“It means that I want to be a research chemist.” Richard
smiled.
“You know what I mean, don’t you? What’s the point of being a research chemist? Do you think that would be fun?
Do you think you’ll cure cancer and save millions of people’s lives?”
Richard looked at him very openly, his eyes slightly mag-
nified by the glasses he had begun to wear four months ear-
lier. “I don’t think I’ll ever cure cancer, no. But that’s not even the point. The point is finding out how things work. The point is that things actually really do work in an orderly way, in spite of how it looks, and you can find out about it.”
“Order.”
“Yeah, so why are you smiling?”
Jack grinned. “You’re going to think I’m crazy. I’d like to find something that makes all this—all these rich guys chas-ing golfballs and yelling into telephones—that makes all this look sick.”
“It already looks sick,” Richard said, with no intention of being funny.
“Don’t you sometimes think there’s more to life than or-
der?” He looked over at Richard’s innocent, skeptical face.
“Don’t you want just a little magic, Richard?”
“You know, sometimes I think you just want chaos,”
Richard said, flushing a bit. “I think you’re making fun of me.
If you want magic, you completely wreck everything I believe in. In fact you wreck reality.”
“Maybe there isn’t just one reality.”
“In Alice in Wonderland, sure!” Richard was losing his temper.
He stomped off through the pines, and Jack realized for
the first time that the talk released by his feelings about the Daydreams had infuriated his friend. Jack’s longer legs
brought him alongside Richard in seconds. “I wasn’t making
fun of you,” he said. “It’s just, I was sort of curious about why you always say you want to be a chemist.”
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Richard stopped short and looked soberly up at Jack.
“Just stop driving me crazy with that kind of stuff,”
Richard said. “That’s just Seabrook Island talk. It’s hard
enough being one of the six or seven sane people in America without having my best friend flip out totally.”
From then on, Richard Sloat bristled at any signs of fanci-
fulness in Jack, and immediately dismissed it as “Seabrook
Island stuff.”
4
By the time Richard returned from the dining room, Jack,
freshly showered and with his wet hair adhering to his scalp, was idly turning over books at Richard’s desk. Jack was wondering, as Richard swung through the door carrying a grease-stained paper napkin clearly wrapped around a substantial
quantity of food, whether the conversation to come might be easier if the books on the desk were The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down instead of Organic Chemistry and Mathe-matical Puzzles.
“What was lunch?” Jack asked.
“You got lucky. Southern fried chicken—one of the few
things they serve here that don’t make you sorry for the animal who died to become part of the food chain.” He handed
the greasy napkin over to Jack. Four thick, richly battered sections of chicken sent up an aroma of almost unbelievable
goodness and density. Jack waded in.
“How long have you been eating as though you oinked?”
Richard pushed his glasses up on his nose and sat down on his narrow bed. Beneath his tweed jacket he wore a patterned
brown V-neck sweater, the bottom of which had been tucked
into the waistband of his trousers.
Jack had an uneasy moment, wondering if it were really
possible to talk about the Territories with someone so tightly buttoned that he tucked his sweaters beneath his belts.
“The last time I ate,” he said mildly, “was yesterday,
around noon. I’m a little hungry, Richard. Thanks for bringing me the chicken. It’s great. It’s the best chicken I ever ate.
You’re a great guy, risking expulsion like this.”
“You think that’s a joke, do you?” Richard yanked at the
sweater, frowning. “If anybody finds you in here, I probably
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will get expelled. So don’t get too funny. We have to figure out how we’re going to get you back to New Hampshire.”
Silence then, for a moment: an appraising look from Jack,
a stern look from Richard.
“I know you want me to explain what I’m doing, Richard,”
Jack said around a mouthful of chicken, “and believe me, it’s not going to be easy.”
“You don’t look the same, you know,” Richard said. “You
look . . . older. But that’s not all. You’re changed.”
“I know I’ve changed. You’d be a little different, too, if
you’d been with me since September.” Jack smiled, looked at scowling Richard in his good-boy clothes, and knew that he
would never be able to tell Richard about his father. He simply was not capable of that. If events did it for him, so be it; but he himself did not possess the assassin’s heart required for that particular disclosure.
His friend continued to frown at Jack, clearly waiting for
the story to begin.
Perhaps to stall the moment when he would have to try to
convince Rational Richard of the unbelievable, Jack asked,
“Is the kid in the next room quitting school? I saw his suitcases on his bed from outside.”
“Well, yes, that’s interesting,” Richard said. “I mean, interesting in the light of what you said. He is leaving—in fact, he’s already gone. Someone is supposed to come for his
things, I guess. God knows what kind of a fairy tale you’ll make of this, but the kid next door was Reuel Gardener. The son of that preacher who ran that home you claim you escaped from.” Richard ignored Jack’s sudden fit of coughing.
“In most senses, I should say, Reuel was anything but the normal kid next door, and probably nobody here was too sorry to see him go. Just when the story came out about kids dying at that place his father ran, he got a telegram ordering him to leave Thayer.”
Jack had gotten down the wad of chicken that had tried to
choke him. “Sunlight Gardener’s son? That guy had a son?
And he was here? ”
“He came at the start of the term,” Richard said simply.
“That’s what I was trying to tell you before.”
Suddenly Thayer School was menacing to Jack in a way
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that Richard could not begin to comprehend. “What was he
like? ”
“A sadist,” Richard said. “Sometimes I heard really pecu-
liar noises coming out of Reuel’s room. And once I saw a
dead cat on the garbage thing out in back that didn’t have any eyes or ears. When you saw him, you’d think he was the kind of person who might torture a cat. And he sort of smelled like rancid English Leather, I thought.” Richard was silent for a carefully timed moment, and then asked, “Were you really in the Sunlight Home?”
“For thirty days. It was hell, or hell’s next-door neighbor.”
He inhaled, looking at Richard’s scowling but now at least
half-convinced face. “This is hard for you to swallow,
Richard, and I know that, but the guy with me was a were-
wolf. And if he hadn’t been killed while he was saving my life he’d be here right now.”
“A werewolf. Hair on the palms of his hands. Changes into
a blood-thirsty monster every full moon.” Richard looked
musingly around the little room.
Jack waited until Richard’s gaze returned to him. “Do you
want to know what I’m doing? Do you want me to tell you
why I’m hitchhiking all the way across the country?”
“I’m going to start screaming if you don’t,” Richard said.
“Well,” Jack said, “I’m trying to save my mother’s life.” As he uttered it, this sentence seemed to him filled with a wondrous clarity.
“How the hell are you going to do that?” Richard ex-
ploded. “Your mother probably has cancer. As my father has
been pointing out to you, she needs doctors and science . . .
and you hit the road? What are you going to use to save your mother, Jack? Magic?”
Jack’s eyes began to burn. “You got it, Richard old chum.”
He raised his arm and pressed his already damp eyes into the fabric at the crook of his elbow.
“Oh hey, calm down, hey really . . .” Richard said, tugging frantically at his sweater. “Don’t cry, Jack, come on, please, I know it’s a terrible thing, I didn’t mean to . . . it was just that—” Richard had crossed the room instantly and without
noise, and was now awkwardly patting Jack’s arm and shoul-
der.
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“I’m okay,” Jack said. He lowered his arm. “It’s not some
crazy fantasy, Richard, no matter how it looks to you.” He sat up straight. “My father called me Travelling Jack, and so did an old man in Arcadia Beach.” Jack hoped he was right about Richard’s sympathy opening internal doors; when he looked