"Then? She called you Becky Bubble in high school? Jesus, why didn't you tell me?"

"What would you have done?"

"I would've told her to shut the hell up!"

Rebecca looked away. "I did tell you once. Junior year. She taunted me in the lunchroom, in front of half our class. You weren't there, but I told you afterward."

"Are you sure? I don't remember that."

"You told me to ignore it." Rebecca's voice got tight, as if she could still feel the sting of humiliation. "You said Chrissy was just playing, and I shouldn't take it so personally."

And then he remembered.

Becky had come out of the lunch room looking pale and shaken. He had asked her what was wrong, and she'd told him. He remembered feeling slightly annoyed by her thin-skinned-ness, and told her to brush it off . . . as if a public humiliation about your facial birth defect could be taken any way other than personally.

"Oh, Beck," he murmured, shaking his head. "God, what an ass."

She gave a little shrug. "You didn't get it. No one ever called you names like that."

He was still reeling from retroactive guilt. "Lucky, I guess," he muttered.

"It wasn't just luck. You had this sort of . . . it was like a protective coating. People knew they couldn't get to you, so they didn't bother."

"I was basically an orphan with a terminal disease, what more could they do to me?"

"Plus you made it clear you had one foot out the door-things didn't affect you."

"But they did."

She chuckled. "I'm not talking about things like Chrissy Stillman."

She was more relaxed now. His admission of guilt seemed to have irradiated the little ball of cancerous anger she'd obviously been carrying around all these years. "You know, in a way I should thank you-both of you," she said. "People can be mean, whether you've got a funny-looking face or not. Part of growing up is learning how not to internalize it. And your reaction helped me realize that I did take things too personally."

"Who wouldn't take something like that personally!"

"No, but see, Becky Bubble wasn't me. That was Chrissy's creation, not mine. I had to get better at not accepting other people's definitions."

"Like your parents'."

"Like anyone's."

He studied her for a moment, the warm brown eyes, the mildly uncontrollable wavy hair . . . the bubble. He had stopped seeing it, he realized, had stopped registering it when he looked at her, and forgot that every time she met someone new they might reject or pity her. And if they were repulsed, she would know it. Her strength wasn't only in her limbs.

"You hate when I call you Becky, don't you?" he said.

She smiled. "No, it's fine. I just decided I like Rebecca better. It's pretty."

"I'll try to call you Rebecca, but I might slip sometimes."

"It doesn't matter what you call me, Sean. We're friends-I'll love you either way."

Yes, he thought. Me, too. Either way.

And he wanted to reach over and touch her shoulder or squeeze her hand. But instead he pushed his plate toward her and said, "Here, eat my fries. Yours have enough salt to make you hypertensive."

CHAPTER 24.

On Sunday morning, Frank Quentzer called. "What's your e-mail address?" he asked Sean. "I need to send the forms and packing list for camp."

"Oh. I don't actually have one."

There were about three seconds of silence. "You don't have e-mail."

"Yeah, I don't really need it. I'll give you my sister's address and get it from her."

But when Sean powered up Deirdre's laptop in the den, he realized he didn't have her e-mail password and wouldn't be able to access the documents without it. He went upstairs and knocked on her door. She didn't answer, so he opened it and whispered, "Dee."

A muffled grunt came from the darkened recesses of the room.

"Dee, what's your password?" he whispered.

"What?" she groaned.

"I need your e-mail password so I can get something a guy is sending me."

"What the hell, Sean."

"Hey, it's for Kevin."

"I don't care if it's for Andrew Lloyd Webber. I'm not giving you my password."

"Well, can you get up and do it for me then?"

There was a lot of muttering about having one day to sleep in and lack of consideration. "Seriously," she said, yanking on a robe. "What grown-up doesn't have his own e-mail account? Oh, yeah-the same one who doesn't have a cell phone."

She followed him downstairs to the den and printed out the forms. Then she headed back to her room. As she crossed through the living room, Sean heard George growl.

"Shut it!" Deirdre barked. Then there was only the sound of her aggravated soles hitting each stair as she ascended.

Kevin wandered into the den and saw Sean filling out the forms. "Wait, don't!" he said.

Sean looked up. "Why not?"

"I'm not sure about going."

"What do you mean? I thought you decided."

Kevin slumped onto the couch. "Yeah, but I remembered something. Ivan said the middle school schedules come out next week. I have to be here."

"Can't you just get it when you get back?"

"No, because they come by e-mail, and they sent out this form asking what e-mail to send it to, but I didn't know what to put, so I just wrote in that I'd go to the school and pick it up."

"I can do that."

Kevin considered this for a moment. "Are you allowed to? I mean, you're not, like, in charge of me or anything."

And who is? thought Sean darkly. Look around, they're dropping like flies. But he said, "I think it'd be okay, under the circumstances."

"What circumstances?"

"The circumstances of my going down there and saying, 'I'm his uncle, give me the paper.' "

Kevin liked this. "Yeah, give me that paper, or else!"

"And if they won't do it . . . I'll . . . take out a squirt gun and squirt them in the face."

"Yeah, and they'll be all like 'Oh, no! Please stop! We'll give you the paper!' "

Sean laughed. "But I'll keep squirting them anyway, just for fun."

"Yeah, then you'll run out of water, and they'll tackle you and call Officer Doug to take you to jail."

"Dougie Shaw? You know him?"

"A little. He came by sometimes."

"For what?"

"I don't know . . . to say 'Hi, how're you doing?' And he'd bring me stuff from the police station, like a plastic whistle and stuff."

"He was the one who told me about Boy Scouts," said Sean.

"Yeah, he knows all kinds of stuff like that."

The night Dougie had brought him home came back to Sean-the incongruity of seeing crazy Dougie Shaw in a police uniform . . . and saying what a good father Hugh had been. Sean wanted to know more about that. And yet part of him didn't. Like Hugh's pranks and shenanigans, his fatherhood had a sort of a semifictional quality in Sean's mind-an interesting anecdote, but probably only half true. Something inside him didn't want it to be fully factual.

The camp packing list had only a few items that Kevin didn't already have, the most critical of which was a Class A Boy Scout uniform. For this they had to go to the Scout Store in Southborough, about fifteen minutes away. Riding down the Mass Pike in the Caprice, Sean said idly, "So you're pretty excited about middle school."

Kevin gave him a look that would melt rocks.

"No?"

"Have you seen it?"

"Well, not recently, but I did go there myself when I was your age."

"It's huge. Like fifty times the size of Juniper Hill. And it's made out of cement with really small windows-and they're never open. And you have to use a locker room for gym and change your clothes and everything. It smells so bad in there I thought I was gonna puke!"

"When were you there?"

"They do this stupid tour thing. All the fifth graders go over on a bus and walk around and listen to stupid talks and stuff." Kevin was getting really agitated. Sean didn't know whether to let the boy blow off steam or to change the subject.

"So apparently we have to get this sticky stuff to glue on the patches," said Sean. "I'm pretty good at stitching up cuts, but I wouldn't have a clue what to do with cloth."

"Did you ever eat lunch in the cafeteria when you went to middle school?"

"Um, yeah. Pretty much every day."

"It's so loud in there. Kids are screaming, and there's like one teacher standing there telling them to settle down. But they don't!"

"Well . . . maybe there's a corner where it's a little quieter."

"I looked," said Kevin. "There isn't."

Sean took his eyes off the highway to glance over at Kevin. The boy's head was turned toward the window. But Sean could see his chin quivering.

"It's normal to be nervous about going to a new place."

There was a little gasp from Kevin, as if his lungs couldn't expand to take in the air. "I don't like bad smells or loud sounds, and I"-another little gasp-"I don't like to be bumped. That's what Ms. Lindquist says. She says it's okay not to want to roughhouse." His narrow shoulders began to quiver. "But that's what they do. They bump into each other all the time in the hallways, and bang each other into lockers, and do high fives-I saw it!"

Kevin began to sob, his body shaking against the seat, the reverberation of his pain filling the car. Sean felt sick. He had no idea what to do-the kid had to go to school, and he was right-there'd be a lot of nasty pubescent smells and shrieking and banging into one another.

The next exit was theirs, and Sean almost missed it. The Scout Store was a few minutes down the road, and he pulled into a space in the parking lot away from the other cars. Kevin's crying had subsided a little, the gasps for air coming with less frequency.

"Kev," said Sean. "It'll be okay."

Kevin shrugged off this lame attempt at comfort and pulled his T-shirt up to wipe his face.

"What did Ms. Lindquist do to help?"

"Nothing really. She just talked to me."

"Just talked?"

"Yeah, and sometimes when she knew it was getting too much, she would give me a look, like she understood, and I would feel better."

"Maybe there'll be somebody like that at middle school."

"No," said Kevin. "There won't." He wiped his face again and got out of the car.