“Did you truly have an allergic reaction?” It was two days later, and Perri was studying Kat’s skin, as smooth and pink as ever.

“My mom took me to the emergency room, and they stuck me with a pen.”

“Like a marker?” Josie was puzzled.

“No, a special pen that sends something to your heart so your throat won’t close up and keep you from breathing. She thought I was going to die.”

Kat’s manner was calm as ever, her voice low; they had to lean in to hear her over the din of the lunchroom. The middle-school cafeteria was thrillingly chaotic, much noisier than elementary school.

“Did you think you were going to die?” Perri’s question struck Josie as odd. If your mother thought you were going to die, then of course you thought so, too. But Kat shook her head. Her hair, now worn loose from a center part, had grown quite long, and Josie noticed that a few of the older boys glanced at Kat’s shining banner of hair as it moved back and forth.

“I wasn’t scared at all. In fact, it was kind of interesting. I felt like Violet Beauregarde in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Remember when she ate the gum and she turned into a giant blueberry?”

“ ‘Take her to the dejuicing room!’” Josie shouted in a fairly good imitation of the movie Willy Wonka, and the others laughed, which made her happy. She so seldom said something funny on her own.

“Exactly,” Kat said. “I just assumed they would take me to the dejuicing room and I would be fine. And that’s what the pen did. It dejuiced me. Everything stopped swelling, and I was okay.”

“But how could you be so sure that you weren’t going to die?” Perri did not want to let that part of the discussion drop.

“That’s not how death happens. From a cupcake, I mean.”

“A person can drown on a teaspoon of water,” Perri said with great authority. “So I suppose a cupcake can kill.”

“Well, it didn’t kill me.”

“How would you like to die?”

“Perri-that’s gross.” Kat had finished her lunch-a cup of yogurt, an apple, and a chopped green salad packed in Tupperware, with an individual packet of salad dressing. Josie slid two of her oatmeal cookies over to Kat, who smiled gratefully.

“No orange flavoring,” Josie said. “Everyone wants to die in their sleep.”

“Yes, but what if that wasn’t a choice? What if you had to choose from choking…” Perri paused for a moment. Her brain sometimes reminded Josie of a computer, taking a few seconds to switch from task to task, then humming along, faster and faster. “Choking or suffocation. Then burning up, plane crash or…”

“Being shot,” Josie supplied.

“No,” Perri said. “That’s instant, so it becomes the easy choice. We need a list of things that are painful and scary.”

“You die instantly in a plane crash.”

“No you don’t,” Perri said. “That’s why people get money when they sue the airlines. For suffering.”

“How do you sue if you’re dead?” Kat asked.

“Not the dead people. Their families. Okay-so being smothered. A fire. Plane crash. We need one more.”

“Need?” Kat asked.

“Our statistics project. Oh, that’s right, you weren’t there on the first day when Mr. Treff explained it. We have to conduct a survey, then chart our results, along with demo…demo…demographics on our survey sample. It’s a poll, like the ones they do during elections, but we can ask anything we want. Mr. Treff said.”

“Drowning,” Josie said.

“What?”

“Death by drowning. That should be the last one.”

“That’s awfully like suffocation,” Perri objected.

“Well, burning up and dying in a plane crash are alike, too.”

“That’s okay,” Kat said. “For things to be alike. After all, the idea is to find out what people pick. Maybe it would be interesting to see if certain people pick drowning while other people pick suffocation.”

They bent their heads together, pleased with themselves. Although no one made the point out loud, Josie knew they were all thinking the same thing: This was a way to get noticed, to make their mark in the new school. Other students would ask boring questions about television shows and desserts. Only they would investigate death.

And so the very next afternoon, a full week before the assignment was due, they set out, notebooks in hand, and began to canvass the neighborhood. The kids they met-school peers, high-school students, younger kids-were happy to answer their questions. (“That is sick,” said an older boy who was hanging out with Perri’s brother, Dwight, a high-school senior. But he clearly meant it in a good way.) Mothers and baby-sitters, however, frowned and told them not to ask such questions.

“It’s our homework,” Perri replied. “It’s for school. We have to do it.”

By Saturday they had polled forty people, but Perri was not pleased with the results. For one thing, far too many people were picking drowning, with plane crashes a distant second. Perri, however, claimed she was more disturbed by what she called demographics.

“We’re doing okay on age, but we don’t have enough over-eighteen men.”

“We have our fathers,” Josie said. Her own father had loved the assignment, if only because he liked to see Josie get excited about anything mathematical.

“That’s all we have. And they all picked drowning.”

“Do you want to go out in the neighborhood and see if there are fathers around?”

“We could, but it’s so inefficient. We need to go to a mall or someplace where there are a lot of men.”

“My mom would take us to the mall,” Kat said.

“Men at malls would all pick drowning,” Perri said. “Just like our fathers. We need to find a wider sample.”

“We’re not supposed to worry about the results,” Josie said. She suspected that Perri disliked the “drowning” responses because the choice had been Josie’s contribution to the poll. “That’s why we vary the order of the possible answers, to control for people picking the first or last thing automatically.”

“Still,” Perri said, “it’s a very narrow sample, just people we know.”

“How are we supposed to talk to people we don’t know?” Kat asked.

“That’s my idea. Let’s get our bikes and meet at Kat’s house on Saturday.”

Glendale had bike paths that connected its various developments, and now that they were in middle school, the girls had been given wide latitude to travel these routes. Still, Old Town Road was forbidden territory, so Josie was shocked when Perri led them to the edge of that busy two-lane strip, almost a highway in its own right.

“We’re not supposed to go on Old Town Road.”

“We won’t,” Perri said, turning right on the shoulder. Josie and Kat had no choice but to follow. Perri was right, they weren’t exactly on the road, although Josie suspected their parents would not be impressed by this technical compliance with the rule. They rode about a mile, passing a feed store and a tractor dealership, until Perri came to a stop at last in a gravel parking lot outside a windowless concrete building labeled, simply, Dubby’s.

“We can’t go in a bar,” Kat said.

“Sure we can. My dad brings me here for mozzarella sticks and cheeseburgers. We can’t sit at the bar, but we can go into the restaurant part.”

The air inside was smoky, the smokiest air Josie had ever smelled, and there were other smells beneath it, mysterious and unknown. The girls blinked rapidly, their eyes adjusting to the gloom. Suddenly a woman flew at them out of the darkness, like one of those shrieking bird persons they had studied in their mythology unit in fifth grade.

“Little girls can’t come in here by themselves. What are you thinking?”

Josie and Kat shrank back, happy for an excuse to flee. But Perri didn’t seem the least bit intimidated. “We’re here on a school project. We would like to quiz your customers for an exercise in polling.”

A man at the bar-an enormous man, with a belly that came so far down his legs that it appeared to rest on his knees-turned to inspect them with interest.