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silver had been tooled with flourishes and the design of a peacock on either side of the handle. The peacock’s eye looked to be a tiny jewel.
    “That an emerald?” I asked.
    “Yup. But only on one side. The left side, where you can get at it with your finger easily. The other eye is green glass. Took me a while to figure it out. Then I realized that if you touch the emerald eye, it cocks the trigger mechanism. Guns like this were meant for a lady’s hand and a lady’s purse. But in case the gun was grabbed away, the assailant couldn’t use it against the lady unless he knew the trick mechanism.”
    “You mean it works?”
    “Better believe it works. Try it.”
    “Is it loaded?”
    “With little tiny slugs,” said Dad.
    I aimed it at a carton full of Styrofoam packing chips in the corner of the room. Kapow! went the gun. Kapow! five more times. The bullets went right through the carton and deep into the wood of the wall beyond. “What are you gonna do with it, Dad?”
    My father took the gun back. He loaded the chambers with six more slugs. Then he dropped it into a red, white, and blue U.S. Olympic team joggers’ pouch, the kind with a zipper and a Velcro belt that runners wear to keep their loose change in. “I’m going to give it to you, Barney,” he said.

Chapter Five
    S UNDAY NIGHT AFTER THANKSGIVING I searched all over the dorm for Snowy. Boys trudged by me, trailing puddles of slush water from their boots, crowing happy insults, and walloping their luggage against the walls of the dormitory. I snaked past them.
    I waited in Snowy’s room until his roommate came shuffling in with two duffel bags slung over his shoulders. “You looking for Snowy?” asked the skinny sixth grader.
    “Where is he?” I said.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Well, did he go home for Thanksgiving?”
    “Snowy doesn’t go home much.” The sixth grader sighed. He was pale-faced with a shock of straight black hair that fell over his forehead. I’d seen him. I did not know his name. He dropped the duffels on the bed, unzipped them, and gazed mournfully at the hopeless jumble of clothes inside. “His mom and his dad are divorced or separated or something like that. His mom’s in France, I think, or one of those countries. His father’s in Canada or Mexico, I forget. Maybe California or Italy.” He sniffed. “Snowy never tells you much. You know? He’s living off campus now. Switched to being a day student. Trying to get anything out of Snowy’s like trying to ... His thought dribbled away.
    I waited, sitting on the bed and pulling shirt after shirt out of one of his duffels for him. “Well,” he went on, “trying to get to know Snowy is the same as trying to get ice cubes out of one of those rubber ice trays that don’t work.”
    I nodded, pulling out more shirts. The shirts had been crisply ironed. The trouble was they’d been packed in a giant ball.
    “Still, it’s good for me, isn’t it? I mean, I get a single room now, just like a senior boy.”
    I asked him if he knew where Snowy was living off campus.
    “Nah. He never says. I’ll be glad to get rid of that skull collection, though.”
    “What?”
    The roommate pointed to an empty shelf. “He used to keep skulls on that. Squirrel skulls, raccoons, stuff he found in the woods. Even a snake skull and backbone. He was weird. I mean, I know his IQ was a hundred and eighty or something, but he gave me the creeps. Look at the stuff he reads!”
    Here Snowy’s roommate handed me a pile of magazines. “You keep them,” he said. “I’m tired of seeing them around. It’ll be nice to have some room here for my stuff.” He cleaned a swath through the grime on his dresser top with the sleeve of a fresh shirt, sneezed at the dust he raised, and wiped his nose on the same sleeve.
    I lugged the magazines back to my room. I let them drop in a heap at the back of my closet but at the last minute pulled off the top one. Kneeling there, I leafed through it. Weak,