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reader."
    Sanborn looked at him sadly. "Here comes a dog. It is black. It is a black dog. 'Let's call it Black Dog,' says Sally. 'Oh, yes,' says Jane. 'Here, Black Dog. Good, Black Dog.'"
    "You know, I think I'm going to beat you up right now," said Henry.
    Sanborn laid his still unorganized nuclear power's danger note cards on the ground. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two dimes. "You better make some calls to get help."
    Henry and Sanborn were testing to see if any calls were necessary when Henry's mother came to pick them up. They brushed themselves off, found their scattered books, picked up the now very unorganized nuclear power's danger note cards, and nodded when they got in. She nodded back—like Mr. DiSalva—and they didn't say a single word while they drove home. Henry figured she had been in the hospital all day, and what was there to say after that? He wished she would turn the radio on.
    When they got to Sanborn's house, he punched Henry lightly on the arm and got out. "Thanks, Mrs. Smith," he said. She nodded and put the car in gear. But before they could pull away, Sanborn's mother was out of the house. Henry heard his own mother sigh as she rolled down the window.
    "How are you, Mary?" said Sanborn's mother. She held her cigarette away from the car window.
    "Fine," said Henry's mother. "We're all doing fine."
    "I've heard that they're thinking of charging that Cambodian boy with attempted murder. Is that true?"
    "I don't know," said Henry's mother. "I suppose it could be true. It was an accident."
    "Well," said Sanborn's mother, "that's not what some say. Those people." She shook her head. "Someone has to do something. And how is Franklin? Is there any more news?"
    "Franklin is doing fine," Henry's mother said. "All the doctors have high hopes."
    "Isn't that fine," said Sanborn's mother.
    "Yes, fine," said Henry's mother.
    Henry thought he might start laughing out loud.
    They pulled away. Silence, except for the sounds of the road.
    "Fine?" said Henry.
    "Well, what should I tell her?" his mother said quickly. "That I sat in my son's hospital room for six hours and he didn't move once? That when Dr. Giles opened his eyelids and flashed a light into his eye, the pupils didn't dilate enough to measure? That the sounds my son makes ... are like none that any boy should ever make? You want me to tell her that the bloody stump is still oozing? You want me to tell her that the nurses come in every two hours to change him because he can't even use a bedpan? What do you want me to tell her, Henry?"
    "That he woke up and said, 'Katahdin.'"
    His mother shook her head. She was trying not to cry. "It didn't mean anything," she whispered.
    But as they rode home, and as Henry laid his head heavily against the window, his heart would not believe that "Katahdin" didn't mean anything. The heart knows what it knows.

    When he first saw her at Longfellow Prep, her eyes swept past him as if he were nothing, another student, someone she didn't know or care to know. But then her eyes had come back, and she put her hand up to her mouth, and she walked over to him. "Aren't you ..."
    He nodded.
    "
This is the first time I've seen you on the ground."
    He wasn't sure that he still was.
    "
Welcome to Longfellow Prep. Ignore all the jerks. Just because this is Longfellow Prep doesn't mean we don't have our share of idiots.
"
    He felt as if he had come to shore after a long voyage.

4
    T HE TOWN OF M ERTON was only half as old as Blythbury-by-the-Sea, but those dwelling in Blythbury now had called Merton a ghost town all their lives. And they were almost right.
    It wasn't always that way. Merton had been blessed with two fast-flowing rivers, and so was about as fine a town in which to build a water wheel as Massachusetts could offer. Huge brick mills went up, and canals between the rivers, and then more mills, and boarding houses to support the mill workers, and homes for the mill managers, and stores for the boarding-house