THIRTEEN.

Mom fries hamburgers at the stove while I sit at the kitchen table and lose my appet.i.te. I have four hours of homework to suffer through, simple but repet.i.tive: conjugate a hundred Spanish verbs, describe the probability of a hundred random events. They like to drive a point home, these teachers of the new economy.

Ally sits across from me, her nose half an inch from the table, her tongue poking between her teeth. Lucas came by with her homeworka"a set of intricate black and white designs on paper with numbers in every white s.p.a.ce. Each number corresponds to a color, and Ally has to fill in each s.p.a.ce appropriately. She starts out well in blue and brown, but then she thinks of Peanut and starts to cry, smearing her work.

Mom sets ketchup and milk in front of us. "I have a patient named Connors whose grandson visits every few weeks. He lives in town. He's sixteen or seventeen, tall like Dallas, with black hair and blue eyes. I could get his id for Dallas to use in Atlanta. We could say he's your half-brother, Daddy's child from another marriage."

"The fingerprints won't match," I say.

"They never check those unless you're arrested."

"The kid would report a lost id. We'd get caught the first place we flashed it. You need to get his pa.s.sport instead. He won't notice that's missing. If you can get his birth certificate, too, we could put Dad's name as his father."

"Good idea. We could use them to get Dallas a new id in Atlanta."

I shoot down her dream. "We'll never get an id with a stolen pa.s.sport. But we might get into Canada with it."

"I don't want to leave the country, Max!" she shouts.

"I don't even want to leave this city."

"We have no choice!"

"What on earth are we going to do in Canada? It's freezing there. If we have to live in a car, I'd rather park it in Atlanta."

Ally carefully picks up her pencils and takes her work to the living room. "I wish you'd put the tent back up!" she yells.

I take a breath and swallow all the sarcastic backtalk that rises up inside me. "At least you have a niece there. You don't have anybody left in Atlanta."

Mom swats the air. "I haven't seen Rebecca since she was your age. I don't even know her. And I don't know anything about Canada. Not anything good anyway. How am I supposed to get a job there? What makes you think they'll let us in?"

"They take anyone with a trade. Their economy's weak and their population is even older than ours. They need nurses. They'll probably pay us to move there." I smile, but she doesn't find it amusing. "They'll let you in, Mom, and you'll find work. We'll be fine. And we can hide Dallas there. We just have to leave before January first or they won't let him out."

"We can leave whenever we like."

"No, we can't! They'll give me another shot when the holiday's over. We have to leave by Christmas. You said you'd take Dallas, and you're not backing out. So get that kid's pa.s.sport and birth certificate to use at the border."

She holds her hands over her face. "Oh my G.o.d, Max, what on earth are we heading into?"

The trade school calls after suppera"Ally must return to school tomorrow or supply a doctor's note confirming her illness. When Mom tells her, Ally bursts into tears. She runs to the living room and stares out the window, crying for her dead squirrel.

"I don't want to send either of you to school tomorrow," Mom says.

I dissolve my homework with a sigh. "The police will take us if we don't go. It's been on the news. Zero tolerance for truancy." Another news story about a bear attack in the national forest gets me thinking about Mom's orchard memories. I lead her into the living room and ask nonchalantly, "Did you tell Ally about the squirrel I saw today when the princ.i.p.al drove me home?"

"What squirrel?" Ally asks through her tears.

"You know that squirrel we saw in the park? The dead one we thought was Peanut?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know if that was really Peanut. On my way home today I saw a squirrel heading toward the forest that looked exactly like her."

Her eyes widen and her mouth hangs open, disbelieving.

"I think she was following the roads out of town," I say. "Away from the poison."

Mom stares at me warily, waiting to see where this goes.

Ally wipes her nose. "You saw a real squirrel? You think it was Peanut?"

"It looked like her. And that one by the tree didn't look like her at all, did it?"

"No, it didn't."

"You know how smart Peanut was. She probably knew there was poison on the ground so she hid in her nest until it was safe to come down. Now she's running away to find a better home."

Ally sniffles and sighs. "Did you really see a squirrel?"

"Yeah. Not far from here. It looked just like Peanut. I told you that, didn't I, Mom?"

"Yes, dear. It slipped my mind."

Ally stares suspiciously at Mom, who avoids her eyes.

"So you know what that means," I say.

Ally shakes her head.

"It's really sad," I warn her.

She shrinks back.

"It means you'll probably never see Peanut again. She's so smart, she won't come back here because of the poison. She'll stay in the forest in an oak tree. You know what comes from oak trees?"

"Acorns," she whispers.

"She'll have time to collect them before it snows," Mom says.

Ally leans over the back of the chair, looks out the window down to the ground. "She's gone," she whispers. "Poor Peanut. She'll miss me." She stares down the back of the chair for a bit. Then she wiggles it away from the wall.

A spider has spun its web in the corner of the living room. It's plain, brown, half an inch long, scared of the light.

"Watch out," I say. "Spiders can bite if you bother them."

"What do you think he eats?" she asks.

"Flies."

"We never have flies. He must be hungry."

"Put the chair back, honey," Mom says. "You're scaring him."

Ally wiggles the chair back, but not as close to the wall as it was before. She leans over the upholstery and smiles. "I'm calling him Fred."

"You're a good brother," Mom tells me after Ally's in bed.

I shrug. "She wasn't going to make it through tomorrow without a lie."

"You make it through too, Max." She sits on the couch with her hands folded in her lap. "I'm sorry I yelled at you. I'm just scared."

"We'll be okay."

She pats my hand. "Sure we will. I looked up some things about Canada. Did you know that parts of it aren't much colder than here?"

I laugh. "That's the part we'll head to."

She smiles. "They have a nursing shortage. That's hopeful, right? And we can keep our citizenship so we could come back eventually."

"Great."

She nods. "I'm sorry I got so mad, Max. I'm supposed to lead you kids out of trouble, not the other way around."

"It's all right. So we're really going?"

"Yes. We're really going. I sent a message to Rebecca. We have a better chance of getting in if we have a place to stay."

"And we can go before Christmas?"

Mom nods. "We'll need a car."

"And a pa.s.sport for Dallas."

"If he really wants to come."

"He really wants to come."

She sighs. "Okay. Hang on a little longer."

Ally can't stop smiling in the stairwell. She's imagining Peanut setting up house in the national forest, packing leaves and mud into a condo in the trees, making squirrel friends, storing acorns.

"You better get those giggles out," I whisper. "Remember how you have to act at school."

She relaxes her face and dims her eyes. We reach for the doork.n.o.b at the same time. She laughs, then turns it into a cough.

"Good girl. Who's going to get the door?"

She points back and forth between us and whispers, "One potato, two potato, three potato, four. Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more." She turns the doork.n.o.b.

Lucas and three other zombies await us. They wear bulky gray coats over their shapeless gray suits. There were more of them last week. They must be cleaning house at the trade school, herding kids into inst.i.tutions for the uneducable. I wonder how many lower rungs there are on the ladder of childhood.

"h.e.l.lo, Lucas," I say. "Nice to see you."

"Nice to see you too, Maxwell. And you, Alexandra. I hope you're feeling better."

"I'm much better, thank you." There's a smile playing behind her eyes, but I doubt the zombies can notice it.

"Goodbye, Ally," I say as she joins them. "Be good."

Dallas has a carefully disguised fit on the school grounds when I tell him we're going to Canada instead of Atlanta. "They're never going to let me across the border!" He keeps a straight face and an even tone but he still manages to convey that he's shouting. "They don't let minors leave the country without their parents' permission."

"We can get you a pa.s.sport with the name Connors on it."

"Oh, that's royal. We look so much alike." He's so mad he has to turn away from me to regain control. "They'll catch us, Max," he says when he turns back. "They'll catch us and they'll send me back and my parents will find out that I'm not treated and they'll turn me into a f.u.c.king zombie."

"No. If we go to Atlantaa"if we go anywhere in the Statesa"any cop who wants to can ask for your id and send you back home when they find out who you are. You can't change your fingerprints. You'll be at risk every day of your life until you're eighteen. But if you cross the border, it's just one risk and you're through."

"It's a big f.u.c.king risk, Max."

"No, it's not. We're going to cross at Freaktown. They let anybody through there."

"What are you basing that theory on?"

I shrug. "Rumors."

He nods for so long that I think it might be some kind of tremor. "It's another country, Max. They're going to examine my pa.s.sport. We can't just glue my picture in it."

"Maybe you look like the kid."

"Maybe I don't."

"Then maybe we could take your real pa.s.sport and forge a letter of permission from your parents."

"They'll call my home."

"Then we'll take the pa.s.sport of someone a bit older who looks like you and you can come with us as an adult."

He clears his throat and says calmly, "Yes. Of course. We'll just make a wish in the pa.s.sport fountain and all my problems will be solved."

"Then we'lla""

He walks away from me, into the school.