"Little boys fight all the time," said Officer Danbury. "It's what they do. If they didn't fight, they'd be girls."

There were a lot of them crowded into the police station. Officer Danbury, Nathan, Penny, Mary, Sharon, Ronald's mom, Will (with his arm bandaged up), and Will's parents.

"However," Officer Danbury continued, "this was no ordinary fight, because one of them was armed, the same as if he'd been carrying a knife or a gun." He looked at Will's mother. "If your son were wandering around town with a gun and he went and shot another boy, you'd expect him to suffer some consequences, wouldn't you?"

"I certainly would!"

"And if he had a knife, and he went around stabbing people just as freely as you please, you'd want to see justice served, right?"

"Indeed!"

"Then it's settled." Officer Danbury turned his attention to Nathan. "You're going to jail, young man."

"But that's not fair!" said Penny.

"Not fair? The law hasn't got anything to do with what's fair. Your boy is a danger to society. Truth be told, I'm uncomfortable standing this close to him even with all of you around to serve as a barrier between us. What if he'd torn out that poor boy's throat? That little bandage Will has on wouldn't do much good toward treating a gaping throat wound. Will, do you really think you'd be standing here right now if he'd torn out your throat?"

"I bet he wanted to!" said Will.

"Of course he did. I know a menace when I see one. That is to say, now that he's committed an act of violence I see him for the menace that he is. Jail will straighten him out, or at least give him a good place to rot."

"No!" shouted Mary. "He was defending my honor!"

"Clearly it was not honor he should have defended," said Officer Danbury. "Ten days in jail for the boy. That's my sentence."

"But you're not a judge!" Penny protested.

"Fourteen days! And if you're not careful you'll join him in his cell!"

"I want to join him!"

"Then fourteen days and he'll have no visitors! Except, of course, for the guard who brings him bread and water, but that guard will not offer him any human comfort!"

Jail! Nathan couldn't believe it. Only scoundrels went to jail!

"Jail is too good for him!" declared Will's mother. "He should be banished!"

"Now, now, some jails may indeed be too good for him, but I a.s.sure you that ours is not."

"He should be executed!" said Will.

"Oh, now, don't be goofy, we're not going to execute a seven-year-old boy for biting somebody. Because of your ridiculous comment I'm knocking a day off his sentence." Officer Danbury pointed his index finger at Nathan and rotated it in a circle. "Turn around so I can handcuff you."

"Too bad you don't have fang-cuffs," said Will.

"He's down to twelve! Are you trying to suspend his sentence entirely?"

Nathan turned around and Officer Danbury snapped the handcuffs on him. As Will laughed and the sisters cried, Nathan was led to his cell.

The cell was cold and dark and smelled bad, but Nathan felt certain that he would still be alive at the end of his sentence. He'd survived all by himself in the forest, and he'd been a year younger then, so he expected to be fine.

It wasn't his fault. If he'd been born with normal teeth, he could have bitten Will for saying those mean things and n.o.body would have cared.

But he shouldn't have bitten him.

He shouldn't have gone to the party at all.

Nathan lay on his pile of hay ("No cot for you!" Officer Danbury had said) and alternated poking his tongue between his freshly knocked-out tooth and the one he'd lost naturally. His new tooth hadn't started to grow in yet. He wondered when he'd be able to feel the point.

Penny and Mary went home and cried in each other's arms. "I would have bitten the little worm's arm myself if I'd been so equipped!" said Penny. "I hope he fails to keep the wound adequately cleaned!"

Mary told Sharon that she couldn't move away to live with her, not until Nathan got out of jail, because Penny needed the company. Sharon told Mary that she understood completely, but that she'd decided to move back to where she'd grown up, far from there.

"I can't go with you!" said Mary. "Not that far! Won't you please stay?"

Sharon shook her head sadly and said that she wanted to stay, but that she just couldn't. She left the next morning.

Will poked at his bandage and thought about Nathan sitting in jail. Though it was a happy thought for him, it didn't make him any less angry. He'd been bitten by somebody who'd been beaten up by a girl! "I hope he dies in there," he'd say to anybody who would listen, and a lot of people were interested in what he had to say. "He deserves awful things to happen! Him and his disgusting, vulgar mother!"

Three times a day, Penny and Mary would ask how Nathan was doing, and Officer Danbury would a.s.sure them that Nathan had not perished. The guard only checked on Nathan once a day, but Officer Danbury was reasonably confident that he wasn't lying to the sisters the other two times each day he answered their question.

Will was sent to the Corner of Ridicule every day, but he didn't care. He loved to talk about how much he disliked Nathan. He did nothing else at recess, even when the teeter-totter was available. "Somebody should burn down their house!" he said, often.

Nathan's cla.s.smate Peter liked the idea of setting fire to a house, though he only ever burned small things, and his father had taught him "If it's alive, don't burn it." He could envision the flames dancing all over the roof, but would never, ever do something so cruel.

It was never officially proven who did do it. Peter's father had heard his son talk about it, and thought it sounded like an excellent way to spend an evening, and spoke of it in a purely hypothetical sense to several of his co-workers at the factory.

They shared this idea with still more people, in a purely "We would never do this, but it would serve them right for having a vicious boy like that!" manner. It took less than one full day for the idea to reach nearly everybody in town, and almost all of them agreed that they would never do it.

On the eighth day of Nathan's sentence, while Penny worked at the library and Mary managed her restaurant, somebody broke into their home with matches and gasoline. Or perhaps it was two people, working together-n.o.body ever knew for sure except for the guilty parties, who were never caught and never confessed.

Penny was helping a little girl find a book about dead clowns when her employer frantically beckoned for her to take a phone call.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"Penny!" It was her next-door neighbor, Eunice. "It's a shocking thing! I'm looking out the window at your house right now and it's a raging inferno!"

"No!"

"I've never seen so much fire concentrated into one place in my life! I called the firemen as soon as the roof collapsed in flames. I shouted 'Save the dog! Save the dog!' and they ran in, but then I remembered that you didn't have any pets, and when they finally came out they were very unhappy to have risked their lives to save a dog that didn't even exist, and they said that for all they cared the house could just burn right down to the ground, so for that I apologize. I hope you didn't have anything nice inside. Oh, the north wall just went down. It's very sad."

Penny was given permission to return home immediately after helping the little girl find the book she wanted (The Clown Who Frowned When He Drowned). By the time she reached her home, it could no longer, technically, be called a "home," but rather a pile of burning rubble.

"At least there was no dog inside to perish," a fireman told her.

Mary arrived home (a term that will continue to be used despite its lack of accuracy) and fell to her knees.

The sisters had always gotten along well, but one point of contention had existed between them: Penny's distrust of banks. Mary felt that they should keep their lifetime of savings safely in a bank, while Penny thought that the money they had worked so hard for would be much safer in a steel safe in Penny's room.

The safe was expensive, fireproof, and came with a guarantee that if the contents were in any way damaged, they would be replaced (or their sentimental value would be paid for such things as photographs, where it would be impractical to regress the subjects to their former ages in order to recreate the pictures). The Invulnerable Safe Company, owned by Lawrence Wicket, had even provided a fancy certificate stating this. Unfortunately, Mr. Wicket had retired and was at this very moment deep in the jungle, enjoying a treasure hunting expedition he'd financed by selling unreliable safes that quickly melted in fire.

It is also not known who set the next two fires, the ones that burned down the restaurant and the library. It might have been the same person who burnt down Penny and Mary's home, or it might have been somebody who appreciated the results.

Either way, they'd lost everything.

Officer Danbury, who was not entirely without empathy, allowed the sisters to visit Nathan in his cell on the last day of his imprisonment. They threw their arms around him and sobbed.

"Don't cry," he told them. "I don't like it here, but it's my last day and I've fared much worse in the past."

They told him about the fires, and Nathan just sat there on his cold stone floor, stunned. Their home, burned to the ground? The restaurant, gone? All that food wasted?

"Didn't they at least take out the books before they burned the library?" he asked.

"No," said Mary. "They burned them all."

Nathan could not even conceive such a thing. "What's to become of us?"

"We have no home, no job, and no money," said Penny. "Mary and I will be moving into the Poor House."

The Poor House? It couldn't be! The legendary Poor House was the most dreadful place imaginable, and grown-ups only lived there through the fault of their children!

"All right, you've told him," said Officer Danbury, who was not entirely without empathy but had very little of it. "Off to the Poor House with you. Those rat traps won't empty themselves."

As Nathan sat in his cell all alone, he wished he could make himself unborn. n.o.body needed him-not if having him around meant losing everything you owned. Why had he bit Will? Why hadn't he merely broken his arm?

Would Penny and Mary let him back into their lives, or would they just leave him in jail, where he couldn't ruin things for anybody else?

If they did come to pick him up, perhaps he'd stay here. "It's very comfortable," he'd say, propping his feet up against the wall. "Yes, I think I'll grow old here."

One hour before Nathan was due to be set free, Officer Danbury opened the door to his cell. A man stood next to him. He was a tall man, dressed in a black suit, with thick black eyebrows, a thin black mustache, and a short black beard. He wore gla.s.ses and carried a cane. The man looked at Nathan, right into his eyes, and it filled him with a strong sense of unease.

"There he is," said Officer Danbury, gesturing to Nathan.

"Thank you for pointing him out," said the man. "Otherwise I might never have figured out which little boy in the otherwise empty cell you'd brought me to find."

Officer Danbury looked offended by this, but said nothing. The man stepped into the cell. He had the look of somebody who might cheerfully find his employment at the gallows. Was he here to strangle Nathan?

"You know why I'm here," he said. "Go on, open your mouth and let me see them."

He was a tall man, perhaps the tallest one Nathan had ever seen. Nathan saw no possible benefits and many possible repercussions if he refused, so he opened his mouth and let the man peer inside.

The man clapped his hands together with delight. "Fantastic! If that sight were to appear in front of my eyes before I shut them for the night, such nightmares would I have!" Then he stepped back, regarded Nathan, and frowned. "The rest of you is about as scary as a baby duck on a velvet pillow. That won't do. Make a scary face for me."

"I don't want to be scary," said Nathan.

"Do as you're told!" said Officer Danbury.

The man looked back at him. "Don't snap at the boy like an impatient simpleton! This is a performance." He returned his attention to Nathan. "You don't have to be scary, I merely want you to act scary. You can do that for me, right?"

"I don't know."

"Of course you can. All boys your age enjoy throwing a good scare into people, and you have more raw material to work with than most. Unleash your inner predator. If you scare me, I'll give you a shiny new coin fresh out of my pocket."

A coin merely for scaring somebody? That sounded too good to be true. Nathan scrunched up his face and bared his teeth.

"Make a frightening noise," the man instructed. "A growling sound. Something like 'Rrrarrr.'"

Nathan growled at him.

"Outstanding! I was almost compelled to clutch at my heart." He reached into his pocket and withdrew a coin, which he pressed into Nathan's hand. "Spend it on whatever you like. I have more, many more, and could keep handing them to you, if you thought you could make that face and that noise on a regular basis. Doesn't that sound like a lark?"

"It doesn't, really."

"Such disrespect!" shouted Officer Danbury. "Do you not realize to whom you're speaking?"

"Enough!" The man gave the officer a dismissive wave. "Your mouth opens and closes, yet the sounds that spew forth contribute nothing worthwhile! Begone, dullard!"

Officer Danbury puffed out his chest and looked as if he were going to protest. Then he unpuffed his chest and sheepishly walked out of the area.

"It was impolite of me not to introduce myself earlier," said the man, extending his hand. "My name is Professor Charleston Kleft."

"Pleased to meet you, sir," said Nathan, even though he wasn't quite certain that he was pleased to meet him at all. He shook his hand. Kleft had a firm, almost painfully tight grip.

"Nathan, I'm going to offer you an opportunity that few boys ever receive. Do you like adventure?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you like thrills?"

"Yes, sir."

"Would you like to travel the globe, eating the finest foods, having your choice of the prettiest girls when you're old enough to appreciate them?"

"I guess so."

"You guess so? That's hardly the degree of enthusiasm I'd expect from somebody whose life I'm going to change for the better. You'll be the envy of everyone you meet. People will punch themselves in the head from the frustration of knowing that they aren't you. You'll hear somebody bragging that he's been to dozens of places in his life, and you'll be able to laugh in his face and tell him that you've been to hundreds of places in yours."

"What do you want me to do?" asked Nathan.

"Simply be a thespian. An actor. Provide a paying audience with some much needed entertainment after a hard day."

"But I don't want to leave Penny and Mary."

"Ah, yes, the ladies who take care of you. Am I to understand that they've fallen on hard times?"