PROLOGUE

 

Haverford, Maine, 2015 

Nathan Tilly gave me the story I’m going to tell, but it was the old paper mill that set my memories free.

I read the report in the Haverford Gazette the previous week.  The mill has not been operational for more than fifty years, but now the land has been sold to a supermarket chain, and the old building is to be razed to make way for a customer parking lot.  The news has prompted vigorous local debate.  Some are angry that the city council has allowed part of our municipal heritage to be sold off.  Others are excited at the prospect of fresh bagels.  Such is progress. 

For myself, I’m sorry to see the old place go.  I want to pay my last respects, watch the thing go down. 

 

The lower end of Bridge Street is lined with mud-encrusted pick-ups and vans.  I have to double back and park on the other side of the river.  It is a beautiful, fresh spring morning.  The faintest of breezes is coming in off the ocean.  As I walk across the bridge I can hear someone shouting instructions through a bullhorn.

Warning signs have been posted along the road, keeping the curious at bay.  Authorized Personnel Only.  Hard Hat Required.  I keep my distance.  A huge crane is parked in front of the old building, its arm stretched high into the sky.  A wrecking ball hangs at the end of the crane’s thick steel rope, fat and heavy with the threat of violence.  The mill’s giant wooden doors have been padlocked shut my entire life, but now they are opened wide, and early morning sunlight falls into the cathedral-like space where vast pulping machines once rumbled from dawn to dusk, the town’s beating heart.  Workmen in reflector vests walk in and out, murmuring into walkie-talkies.  I guess they are checking all three floors for uninvited visitors before the walls start crashing down.

The mill’s red brick chimney rises tall and straight into the sky.  By lunchtime it will be gone.

At precisely nine o’clock there is a long, shrill blast from a whistle.  A man climbs into the cabin of the crane and turns on the ignition.  As the engine rumbles to life, the arm of the crane begins to move from side to side, and the wrecking ball starts to swing. 

The old mill has been on the brink of demolition for years.  Up and down this part of the southern Maine coast, from Biddeford to Brunswick, abandoned industrial buildings have been rescued and revivified, artfully repurposed for twenty-first century living.  Those ancient spaces have been reborn as art galleries, office suites with double-height ceilings, and organic delicatessens selling squid ink pasta from Umbria and artisanal cheeses from Vermont.  Everyone has been waiting for a similar metamorphosis to happen in Haverford.  It hasn’t been for want of trying: in 2004 a consortium of property speculators from away went crazy for the mill’s exposed brickwork.  An architect was commissioned to design a warren of luxury condominiums with reclaimed timber floors and glinting chrome appliances.  But the town lacked the necessary real estate mojo to pull it off.  No matter how pretty the artist’s impressions in the brochure looked, nobody was buying.  Not a single unit was sold, and the promised renovation never happened.  The place has remained abandoned and deserted ever since.

The wrecking ball is swinging fiercely now, slicing through the air in ever more violent arcs.  The crane operator begins to rotate the cabin, gradually turning it toward the old walls.  I feel my body stiffen in anticipation of the first impact.  When it comes, there is an infernal roar of collapsing brick, crushed wood, and splintering glass.  That’s when I feel a release within me, a quiet letting go.  The crane operator edges the caterpillar tracks forward a few feet, and moments later another slab of wall disappears.  A fog of atomized red brick hangs over the rubble.  I watch for a few minutes, and then turn away.  There is nothing more to see. 

As I walk back over the bridge, I think about those two gravity-defying summers, almost forty years ago, when the old mill gave us shelter, and Nathan Tilly’s gift for boundless hope gave us wings.  Nathan loved the mill so much.  Inside those old brick walls, the light of uncomplicated happiness shone down on us, as warm and as comforting as the sun. 

But such a bright light casts long, dark shadows.

I open the door of my car and climb in.  I rest my hands on the steering wheel and gaze back across the bridge.  The wrecking ball is still swinging hard, making its way toward the mill’s chimney.

I do not want to see the chimney fall.  I drive away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1976

ONE

 

 

 

Sometimes life-changing moments slip by unnoticed, their significance only becoming apparent in the light of subsequent events.  But Nathan Tilly was never one for the subtle approach.

The summer of 1976 had been long and humid.  The horseflies had been larger and more vicious than in past years, which was saying something.  They had swarmed around me, taking painful chunks out of my sweet, thirteen year-old flesh.  My legs and upper body bore the scars of months of relentless attack.  For me the smell of summer was not the salty tang of the ocean, nor the ambrosial scent of young blueberries, but the sour chemical whiff of antiseptic cream that my mother would slather on my bumpy mosaic of bites, a constellation of unending irritation.  On the first day of my eighth grade year at Longfellow Middle School, my shoulders were still itching from the horseflies’ diabolical attention. 

My discomfort was also, I am sure, a physical manifestation of the anxiety that I was feeling that day.  I had been dreading the start of the new school year all summer.  Every blissfully unscheduled day of vacation was, to me, just one step closer to seeing Hollis Calhoun again.

For most of the previous year, Hollis Calhoun had bullied me without mercy.  He undertook a campaign of terrors, small and large.  Some of it was innocuous enough – an unanticipated cuff around the back of the head in the corridor, a sharp elbow jab to the ribs in the cafeteria line – but he also liked to corner me out of sight of others, and inflict more elaborate, sustained cruelties.  He crowded in on me, heavy and huge, obliterating the world beyond his fists.  His violence was claustrophobic as well as cruel. There was a warped intimacy in all those carefully administered punches and kicks.  He would scrutinize my face intently as he hurt me, delighted by the fear in my eyes.

For all his thuggery, Hollis possessed a nuanced understanding of the psychological mechanics of terror.  He took care to ensure that his attacks were never predictable.  Not knowing when they might come, I was in a constant state of high alert.  Sometimes he would leave me alone for days, which had the paradoxical effect of ratcheting up my sense of impending dread.  When I finally saw him lumbering toward me, I felt something oddly close to relief that the wait was over.  The threat of Hollis Calhoun’s fists that marauded across my fevered imagination was worse than any blow they could land in actuality.

There had been nothing I could do to make Hollis stop, since he didn’t appear to want anything from me.  My terror seemed to be an end unto itself.  He never told me what I had done to deserve his attention, and always the same unanswered question would fog my panicked brain as he approached me with that malevolent look in his eye: why me?

Hollis was a year older than me, and I had consoled myself with the thought that at least he would be graduating to high school in the fall.  Then, a week before the school year ended, Hollis had cornered me in the boys’ locker room.  He pressed one side of my face into the cold floor, his knee in the small of my back, and told me that he was being held back a grade.  He would be at Longfellow again next year.  He banged my head against the tiles a couple of times, as if this was somehow my fault. 

As I pushed open the door to my classroom, the prospect of seeing Hollis Calhoun again, combined with the ferocious itching beneath my shirt, had plunged me into my own universe of self-pity.  I sat down at the nearest desk and opened my bag.  As usual, my mother had left me a folded note.  Her choice of quotation that day seemed especially apt.

 

The Lord is my helper; I will not fear.  What can man do to me?

  

Hebrews, 13:6

 

That was indeed the question.  I had spent much of the last three months anxiously imagining what abominations Hollis had in mind for me.  I looked up gloomily, and noticed an unfamiliar presence in the row ahead.  Most of my classmates were already slumped in bored disaffection over their desks, but a new boy I did not recognize sat bolt upright in his chair.  His hair was as black as the leather on my mother’s Bible.  He wore a green cable-knit turtleneck sweater, which looked insufferably hot on that warm morning.  While I was surreptitiously examining him, he turned and looked right at me.  Our eyes met for the briefest of moments, and then I looked away.  New arrivals were to be treated with extreme caution until their position in the classroom pecking order could be calibrated.  I bent down and pretended to look for something in my bag.  The new boy didn’t turn back around, though.  He kept looking at me. 

 

The day dragged on impossibly slowly, but not slowly enough for me.  As the hands on the clock above the blackboard crept toward the final bell, I could feel the fear rising in my throat. 

As soon as classes were over I ran to fetch my things, hoping for a quick escape, but Hollis Calhoun was already waiting for me, leaning against the door of my locker.  To my dismay, he seemed to have grown even bigger over the summer.  We looked at each other without speaking.  There was nothing to be said. Hollis twisted my arm roughly behind my back and began to march me against the tide of students who were streaming toward the exit. The corridors became more deserted as we walked toward the back of the school.  Like a nostalgic lover, Hollis was taking me back to one of our old haunts.  He stopped in front of the boys’ locker room, and pushed me inside. 

He grabbed my shirt and shoved me up against the wall, snapping my head backwards.  The summer evaporated in an instant.  Pinned there by his fists, it felt as if we had never been apart.  Hollis was peering beadily at me.  I averted my gaze and said nothing.  After a moment he relaxed his grip, took a half step away from me, and put a ferocious knee into my thigh.  I yelped and dropped to the ground.  He pushed me over on to my back with his foot.  Pain began to radiate across my lower body.  Killer dead legs were a specialty of his.  He held me down and went to work on my upper arms, pressing and pulling my skin into fat knots of pain.  He found the worst of my horsefly bites and pinched them with brutal relish. 

“Oh, this is just like old times, isn’t it?” he whispered.  “Are you ready for another year of fun?”

Before I could answer Hollis hauled me to my feet and dragged me to the nearest cubicle.  He flung open the door and pushed me inside. Still holding the collar of my shirt, he flipped up the lid of the toilet.  He kicked the backs of my legs and I collapsed to my knees. 

“I thought we might try something new,” said Hollis.  He grabbed my hair and pushed my head into the toilet bowl.  I just had time to take a deep breath before he pulled the chain.  He held my head firmly in place as water sluiced through my mouth and up my nose. When he finally yanked me out of the bowl I sucked air into my lungs, and then started coughing.  Hollis did not relinquish his grip on my collar.  “We’re just getting started,” he told me.  To my disappointment, I felt the prickle of tears at the corners of my eyes. 

Just then there was a loud bang, and Hollis lurched into me.  The door of the cubicle had been flung open.  Standing there was the new boy from class that morning. 

“Let him go!” he yelled.

Hollis and I were both too surprised to speak.  Neither of us really wanted to be interrupted.  Hollis was too busy enjoying himself, and I didn’t want my humiliation made worse by a witness.  As we stared at our intruder, he began kicking Hollis on the shins.  In that tiny cubicle there was nowhere for Hollis to go.  Laughing, he let go of me for a moment and tried to push the boy away.  His attacker responded by stepping in closer and hammering his fists against Hollis’s chest.  He was no match for Hollis physically, but what he lacked in strength he made up for with sheer ferocity.  The cubicle was crowded with the three of us squeezed in there.  The new boy was by the door and I was still kneeling in front of the toilet bowl.  Sandwiched between us, Hollis had no room to defend himself properly or mete out retribution.  The boy stepped in to deliver another flurry of punches, which Hollis swatted away. He had stopped laughing by then.  Now the fight was conducted almost entirely in silence.  All I could hear was the boy’s heavy breathing, and a few grunts from Hollis whenever a punch landed on target.  I cowered on the floor, hoping not to be kicked.  My head and shirt were soaking wet.  The world beyond the cubicle vanished.  The three of us were so focused on the strange, unequal struggle within its walls that we failed to hear the door of the locker room open.

The shout of anger that followed we heard well enough.

TWO

 

 

 

Ten minutes later, the three of us were sitting on a bench in a deserted school corridor.  The janitor who had interrupted the fight had hauled us out of the cubicle, one by one, grabbing us by the scruffs of our necks like newborn kittens.  Identifying Hollis Calhoun and the new boy as the principal antagonists, he had propelled them angrily in front of him toward the principal’s office.  I – obviously the victim of whatever malfeasance was being perpetrated – had been left to trail behind them. 

Now I was wedged uncomfortably in between the other two boys.  My shirt was soaking wet, and the brisk efficiency of the school’s air conditioning was starting to make me shiver.  Hollis Calhoun glowered over my head at my new classmate.

“You got a name, hero?” he muttered.

The boy turned to look at him.  “Nathan Tilly,” he said.

“You’ve got a nerve, interrupting us like that,” said Hollis.

“More nerve than you, that’s for sure,” said the boy. 

For a gratifying moment it looked as if Hollis had swallowed his tongue.

I turned toward Nathan Tilly.  “I really wouldn’t –”

“Do you always pick on people half your size?” asked Nathan, ignoring my warning.  “Scared of a fair fight, are you?”

Hollis’s neck had turned red.  “The only person who should be scared right now,” he said, “is you.”

Nathan Tilly picked an invisible piece of lint off his sweater.  “Oh, I’m scared all right.”  He held up a hand and began to count on his fingers.  “I’m scared that my mongoose is going to run away.  I’m scared that my father is going to fall off his boat and drown himself, because he’s a lousy swimmer.  I’m scared that Frank Lucchesi is going to stay on as manager of the Texas Rangers and run the team into the ground.”

“You have a mongoose?” I said.

“I’m scared that the Russians are going to blow us all to smithereens,” continued Nathan Tilly.  “I’m scared that I’ll never fall in love.  And, just between you and me,” – he leaned in conspiratorially – “I’m a tiny bit scared of spiders.  You know, the fat, hairy ones.”  He paused, and looked directly at Hollis.  “But one thing I am not scared of,” he said, “is you.”

I gazed at Nathan Tilly in wonder.  Hollis Calhoun was staring at him, too.

When we had read Rikki-Tikki-Tavi in seventh grade, we’d done a whole unit on the mongoose.  “Mongooses are illegal in this country,” I said.

“Maybe they are, maybe not,” said Nathan Tilly carelessly.

“Why do you have a mongoose?” I asked.

“To catch snakes.”  

“Snakes?”

“This was when we lived in Texas,” explained Nathan Tilly.  “Our backyard was full of copperheads and cottonmouths.  A mongoose loves to kill snakes, but he’s not found a single one since we moved to Maine.  I think he’s bored.”  He turned to Hollis.  “That’s why I’m scared he’ll run away,” he explained. 

Hollis was still unable to speak.

“Is he a pet?” I asked.

“Well, we keep him outside.  He’s tethered to a rope, near the house.  Otherwise he’d disappear into the forest and we’d never see him again.” 

I imagined the mongoose, hitching a lift south, back to Texas and the snakes. “Where in Texas are you from?” I asked him.

“A small town in the west.  Nowhere you’ve heard of.”

All I knew about Texas was that the Johnson Space Center was in Houston, and President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas.  In my imagination it was a vast desert, populated by rugged, dusty cowboys with big hats.  It couldn’t have been much more different from coastal Maine. 

“When did you move here?” I asked him.

“At the start of the summer.”

“Do you like it?”

Nathan Tilly looked at me.  “You sure do ask a lot of questions,” he said. 

“Sorry,” I said, blushing.

“What’s your name?” asked Nathan.

“Oh, don’t you know?  This is the great Robert Carter.”  Hollis had finally recovered the use of his voice.  “But he’s far too important to bother with people like you and me.”

“He doesn’t look very important,” said Nathan.

Hollis gave me a quick cuff on the back of my head.  “His family owns the amusement park outside of town.  I just spent the summer working there, earning crap wages.”  He looked at me with contempt.  “I didn’t see him working, though.  He was probably sitting by his swimming pool being fed ice cream by his butler.” 

I closed my eyes.  So that was why Hollis had been picking on me all this time – he thought I was a member of the town’s privileged elite.  When he hit me, he was (literally) striking a blow for the downtrodden proletariat.  I shouldn’t have been surprised.  Hollis wasn’t the first person to imagine that my family was wealthy.  I’d been encountering the same assumptions and petty jealousies since kindergarten.

“We don’t have a butler,” I said wearily.  “Or a swimming pool.”

“I didn’t even know there was an amusement park,” said Nathan.

I looked at him gratefully.

“Listen,” said Hollis.  “When they ask us what was going on back there, we’ll tell them that we were fooling about, OK?  Just a little bit of fun.  Nothing serious.  Got it?”

The last thing I wanted was to give Hollis Calhoun’s bullying the additional fuel of self-righteous vengeance.  I nodded.  “Nothing serious,” I repeated.

“What about you, Nathan Tilly?” said Hollis.  “Do we have a deal?”

Before Nathan could answer, a familiar voice called my name, followed by the anxious clip of sensible shoes hurrying down the corridor.  My mother came to a stop in front of the bench.  She clutched her handbag in front of her like a shield, as if it might ward off whatever unpleasantness was about to happen.  She looked me up and down.  “Robert,” she said.  “You’re soaking wet.  What’s been going on?”

Hollis Calhoun shifted a little closer to me, radiating menace.  “We were just having a bit of fun,” I mumbled.  “Nothing serious.”

My mother glanced between Hollis and Nathan Tilly.  “I got called into school because of a bit of fun?” she said.  Hollis stared down at the space between his feet, smirking.  Nathan Tilly looked my mother in the eye and, to my horror, gave her a wink.  To my surprise, she blushed.  Without another word, she turned away and pushed open the door to the principal’s office.

The three of us sat in an uneasy silence for a few minutes.  I wondered what story my mother was being told.  Over the years she had spent many hours in tense conference with school principals, but never because of me.  My flawless behavioral record was about to be compromised, and she looked as if her heart was going to break.  I gazed resentfully at Nathan Tilly.  This was all his fault.  Whatever private misery Hollis Calhoun might have inflicted on me would have been preferable to the circus of recrimination that I would now have to endure.  I had never told anyone about Hollis’s bullying, because my silence allowed me to contain the damage he could cause.  The last thing I needed was well-meaning adults clucking in disapproval and trying to make things better.  I knew they would only make things worse.

More footsteps echoed down the corridor.  When I looked up I was surprised to see a man approaching us.  (I had seen countless mothers arrive to collect their children from the principal’s office, but I couldn’t remember ever seeing a father show up before.)  The man had an untamed beard, peppered with grey.  A dark blue sailor’s cap was pulled down low over his forehead at an incongruously jaunty angle. 

“Ahoy!” called the man, his deep voice booming down the deserted corridor.

“That’s my dad,” said Nathan, unnecessarily.

Mr. Tilly stopped in front of us and looked at his son.  “Didn’t take you long to be sent to the principal’s office, did it?” he said.  To my surprise, his face broke into a wide grin.  “Excellent work, Nathan.  First class.”  He turned to me.  “Who are you?” he asked.

“This is Robert Carter,” said Nathan.

Nathan’s father looked at me.  “Why are you so wet, Robert Carter?”

I felt Hollis’s flat eyes on me.  “We were just having a bit of fun,” I said.

“Really.  Fun for whom, I wonder,” said Mr. Tilly.  This was met with three blank looks.  “Oh, I see,” he said cheerfully.  “Honor among thieves, is it?”  He removed his cap and tucked it under his arm.  “Well, we’ll get to the bottom of it soon enough.”  With that he turned and pushed through the door of the principal’s office.

After a moment Hollis spoke.  “If we all keep quiet, they won’t be able to prove anything.”

“Which would be great for you,” said Nathan.

Hollis looked at him.  “And for you.”

“What about Robert, though?” said Nathan.

“I’m fine,” I said anxiously.

Just then the door to the office opened and the principal’s secretary stuck her head out.  “You can come in now,” she said.

The principal of Longfellow Middle School, Mr. Pritchard, was in the twilight of a long and dispiriting career.  He had taught eighth grade English for twenty years, and his heart still beat blackly with the accumulated disappointments born of unsuccessfully cajoling generations of sullen thirteen year-olds into reading Huckleberry Finn.  But if his time as an educator had been unfulfilling for everyone involved, now Mr. Pritchard had found his true métier.  He was a born administrator.  He loved to impose order upon chaos. Insubordination and rule-breaking were not tolerated.  Sanctions were imposed swiftly and without mercy. 

As we filed silently in, Mr. Pritchard glared at us from behind his desk.  My mother and Mr. Tilly were sitting to one side.  We shuffled to an awkward halt in the middle of the room.  Principal Pritchard looked us over, not bothering to hide his irritation.

“We might as well begin,” he said.  “We called your mother, Hollis, but apparently she was too busy to come in.”  He did not sound surprised.  I guessed that Hollis’s mother and the principal were already well acquainted.  “So, gentlemen.  Restroom cubicles are designed to accommodate one person, not three.  And they really just have one function.  So will someone explain what the three of you were doing?”

There was a long silence.  Finally Hollis spoke up.  “We were just having a little bit of fun,” he said. 

“A bit of fun,” said Mr. Pritchard.

“You know, fooling around,” elaborated Hollis.

Mr. Pritchard’s eyes settled on me.  “Would you agree, Robert?  You were just fooling around?  Because it looks as if you were fooling around more than anyone else.”

I didn’t dare look up.  I didn’t want to see the disappointment on my mother’s face. “Just a bit of fun,” I agreed.

“That’s a big fat lie.”  Nathan Tilly pointed at Hollis, and then at me.  “He was flushing his head down the toilet.  And before that he was hitting him and kicking him.  I heard it all.”

My mother stiffened in her seat.

Mr. Pritchard looked at me.  “Is that true?”

“Of course it’s true,” said Nathan’s father.  “He’s soaking wet, for God’s sake.  How else do you explain that?”

“We were just fooling around,” said Hollis again.

Mr. Pritchard cleared his throat.  “And what were you doing in the boys’ locker room so long after the last bell, Nathan?  You should have been out of the school gates and on your way home by then.”

“I got lost,” said Nathan. 

“Lost?” echoed Mr. Pritchard.  As the word hung in the air, the question seemed to morph into an accusation.

“It’s his first day,” said Nathan’s father.  “Have you never taken a wrong turn before?”

“I’m just trying to establish what happened here,” answered Mr. Pritchard stiffly. 

“He’s already told you,” said Mr. Tilly.  “Robert was being bullied, and Nathan tried to stop it.  My son’s done nothing wrong.”  He pointed at the principal.  “You have a bullying problem. And I want to know what the hell you’re going to do about it.”

Mr. Pritchard looked rattled.  He didn’t like having his prosecutorial process disrupted by rowdy parents.  “First of all,” he bristled, “we don’t use that kind of language here.”

Nathan’s father frowned.  “What kind of language?”

“What you said.  That word.”  Mr. Pritchard paused.  “H–E–Double hockey sticks.” 

There was a moment’s silence, and then Mr. Tilly began to roar with laughter.  A rich, deep, thunderous gale of unbounded hilarity ricocheted off the office walls.  He was laughing so hard that he bent forward and grabbed his stomach as it shook – it was, quite literally, a belly laugh.  Mr. Tilly’s amusement was infectious.  As I watched him, it was impossible not to smile, too.  I glanced across at Nathan, who had begun to laugh as well.  My mother was looking at her shoes, but the corner of her mouth was twitching upward into a grin.  Hollis smirked.  The only person who was not laughing was Mr. Pritchard, who sat behind his desk, his cheeks pink with anger.

Nathan’s father did his best to compose himself, but it was clear that he was having difficulty keeping a straight face.  “I’m sorry,” he said, obviously not sorry in the slightest, “but do people really talk that way around here?”

“Some of us do,” said Mr. Pritchard, tight-lipped.  “You’re not in Texas any more, Mr. Tilly.”

“Oh, don’t I know it.  In Texas people would be more worried about the fact that students are being bullied, instead of objecting to my language.”  Mr. Tilly had stopped laughing now.  “I should give you a real four letter word to complain about.”

I decided that I liked Nathan’s father.

Mr. Pritchard had picked up a pen and was stabbing its nib into the topmost piece of paper on his desk.  He finally looked up at me.  “Has this ever happened before, Robert?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“That’s a big fat lie, too,” said Nathan Tilly.  “I heard them talking in the locker room.  This was going on last year, too.”

“Is that true?” asked my mother sharply.

“You need to get your house in order,” Nathan’s father told Mr. Pritchard.  “Shall I spell out what that looks like to me?  It starts with a B.  Then U, L, L, S, H –”

“Really,” said the principal, “there’s really no need to be quite so –”

“Who knows how much longer this would have gone on if Nathan hadn’t intervened?” asked Mr. Tilly.  “I want to know what you’re going to do to stop this from happening again.”

Mr. Pritchard went very still for a moment, and then he stood up.  “I don’t think we’ll need to worry too much about that,” he said.

We all looked at him, surprised.

“This matter is closed,” said Mr. Pritchard.  “I can assure you, Mr. Tilly, and you, Mrs. Carter, that everything will be taken care of.  You may all go.  Except you, Hollis.  You stay.”

Hollis shot me a poisonous look as my mother ushered me out of the room.  We stood in the empty corridor with Nathan and his father.  My mother’s face was pale.  I wasn’t looking forward to the trip home.

“I’m Leonard Tilly,” said Nathan’s father, extending his hand toward my mother. 

They shook.  “Mary Carter.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“I wish the circumstances had been different,” said my mother.  She turned to Nathan.  “Thank you, Nathan,” she said.  “That was a brave thing you did.”  She nudged me.

“Yeah, thanks,” I mumbled.

Nathan beamed at us, oblivious to the bucketfuls of discomfort he had heaped upon me.  My mother was right.  It was a brave thing that he’d done.  And he wasn’t scared of Hollis Calhoun, not one bit.  Nathan Tilly, I decided, was either a hero or an idiot.  Whichever it was, I couldn’t help but like him. 

“Well look,” said Mr. Tilly, “I think this calls for some sort of celebration.”  He rubbed his hands together.  “Good conquering evil, a triumph for the underdog, all that stuff.  We should all go and have some ice cream, or gin, or something.  What do you say?”

“We really need to be getting home,” said my mother.  “Robert’s brother is in the house on his own, and he doesn’t like to be left alone for too long.”

This wasn’t true, and she knew it.  Whenever he had the house to himself Liam played his punk records as loud as he could, gleefully rocking back and forth in his wheelchair, rattling the window frames with all the noise.

“Perhaps another time then,” said Mr. Tilly.

“That would be great,” I said.

He looked at me kindly.  “We’ll plan on it,” he said.  “And don’t worry,” he added, turning to my mother, “we’ll mainly eat ice cream.  No more than a glass or two of gin, I promise.”

My mother smiled wanly.

“Quite an eventful first day of school, all in all,” said Mr. Tilly, ruffling his son’s hair.  “Are you ready to go home?”  Nathan nodded.  They turned and began to walk down the corridor.  As I watched them go, something occurred to me.

“Mr. Tilly?” I called.

They turned back to look at me.

I cleared my throat.  “Do you really have a mongoose?”

“Of course we do.”

I couldn’t help myself.  “But aren’t mongooses illegal?”

Nathan’s father grinned at me. 

“Maybe they are, maybe not,” he said.