“Will?”

“Yeah.”

“Relax,” she says, and puts her hands on my shoulders. “You’re just about the most interesting thing that’s happened to this place in sixty years. I’m not going to rat you out.”

I feel the way she’s holding on to my shoulders and realize she’s right. Things around here just got a lot more interesting. “So I hear there’s a Homecoming dance coming up in a couple of weeks?”

Andrea doesn’t say anything at first, just slips me a smile in return as she turns and starts toward the door.

“One step at a time,” she says. “Meanwhile”—she pauses to take one last look at the framed photo of the happy family on my desk—“your secret’s safe with me.”

Three

I’M TOTALLY ASLEEP, BURIED UNDER THREE LAYERS OF BLANKETS, when a fist pounding on the door shoots me fifty stories straight up into stark reality. It’s late, or really early—I can’t tell. The glowing blue numerals next to my head read 1:11.

“Wake up, Mr. Humbert,” a harsh voice orders from out in the hall. “Open the door. Right now.”

I sit up, kicking off the blankets, and swing my legs around, still half asleep and dreaming of room service at the Ritz-Carlton. The bare wooden floorboards are ice-cold beneath my feet. By the time I’m standing up, shoving my toes into my slippers, whoever’s knocking has already got a key rattling the lock, and the lights suddenly blaze on, making me squint at the blue-uniformed figure barging toward me.

Things go from bad to horrible without so much as a detour in the direction of worse. The tall bald guy in front looks like a cop, but then I realize he’s campus security, followed by a distinguished man with a trimmed beard and a rich burgundy bathrobe with the Connaughton insignia emblazoned on the breast. Something about his pinched, sophisticated face makes him look more infuriated than the security guard, if that’s even possible.

“Get up, Mr. Humbert,” the distinguished man snaps. “Pack your things. You’re leaving Connaughton. Tonight.”

“Hold on,” I say. “What’s going on?” Maybe if I blink my eyes fast enough, I can blame this whole thing on a misdiagnosed seizure disorder. “Who’s Mr. Humbert, and who are you?”

“I’m Dr. Melville,” he says. “I’m the head of the school here, which I thought you might have realized by now. And this is what’s going on.”

He thrusts in my face a folder with a profile sheet clipped to the top, and I see just enough of it to recognize my own photograph staring back at me. The picture is two years old, the most recent one that the New Jersey Department of Human Services has access to—not my best angle. The backwards Yankees cap and surly you’re-not-the-boss-of-me smirk don’t help. “I assume this looks familiar?” Dr. Melville sneers.

“Where did you get this?”

“I got an angry call from a headmaster down in New York, at the institution that you listed as your last school. Your transcript papers came back. Nobody has ever heard of Will Shea. But the State of New Jersey knows all about Billy Humbert.” Dr. Melville points beyond the window. “There’s a car waiting for you outside.”

“Get packing,” the security guard orders. It’s his one line in this poor excuse for a crisis, and he delivers it with disgruntled gusto.

“Okay. Just”—I glance around the room—“give me a second to get dressed, okay?”

“You’ve got two minutes.”

I nod and shut the door after them, turning back to the window.

This is why I always get a room on the first floor.

Ninety seconds later, I’m sprinting across campus in my bedroom slippers, making for the main gate at a dead run with all my earthly belongings in a backpack flapping against my shoulders. At least there’s a full moon to keep me from crashing into the trees.

I don’t recommend running cross-country in slippers, especially not in the freezing cold of late October, when your toes go numb first. Twice I trip over tree roots and once almost collide with a giant statue of the founder of the school, Lancelot Connaughton himself, one hand extended boldly toward the future. By the time I get across the lacrosse field, reach the gate, and toss my backpack over, I’ve got so many twigs and branches stuck to my legs that I’m wearing my own forest camouflage, which actually proves handy when the sidelight of the campus security SUV waiting outside the gate swings around and hits the ground just in front of me.

I lie there on my stomach with my heart pounding in my chest. My lungs feel as if a pair of cackling pyromaniac twins are setting off Roman candles inside them. Time has now officially stopped. Then, approximately one eternity later, the headlights finally drift away, and I pick myself up and brush myself off, slipping into the woods alongside the road that runs toward town.

After I’m sure the coast is clear, I stumble out of the trees and onto the pavement, where the walking is easier, or at least doable. It’s a six-mile trek to town, but I can make it on adrenaline alone. I can probably scrape together the cash for the next bus back to Trenton, and by the time I arrive, I should have some kind of plan.

I hope.

I’ve been walking for a half hour when a sports car comes flying around a curve, barreling straight at me, tires screeching to a halt less than a foot away from my shins. It’s a foreign job, some kind of low-slung coupe with one headlight out, and the driver who stumbles out of it looks like he’s got only one functional headlight himself. For a second he just stands there in the middle of the road with his tie yanked down and his shirttails hanging below his sweater vest, blinking at me with the bleary, slack-jawed disbelief of a man whose ventricles are currently pumping more Glenfiddich than blood.

“Who . . . ?” he manages, in a whiskey-fueled slur, and I realize who it is. “Shea?”

“Mr. Bodkins?”

“What . . .” My now former English teacher leans a little against the side of the car, peering at me through narrow eyes. “What are you doing out here in the middle of the night?”

“I was . . .” I realize that he doesn’t know anything about what happened and I’m free to extrapolate at will, as it were. Not that it matters now. “I was headed into town.”

“Now?”

“I need to get to the bus station. There’s been an accident back on the island, and I need to get home as soon as I can.”

“Is everything all right?”

“I’m not sure,” I say. “The headmaster woke me up in the middle of the night.” In the midst of another massive lie, a little truth trickles through my system like a cool sip of water. “I had to leave right away.” More truth—this stuff could get addictive. “There wasn’t a moment to lose.”

“So you’re walking?” Mr. Bodkins slides a little down the hood of the car, catches himself, and stands upright again. “You need a lift?”

I hesitate, wondering if I should entrust my life to a man who looks like he’s spent the last four hours marinating himself in single-malt scotch in one of the town’s three taverns, and decide I don’t have much choice. It’s cold and my legs already feel like overcooked rotini.

I climb in.

Five minutes later we’re careening through the countryside, flying past maples and stone fences at eighty-five miles an hour like Robert Frost on speed. The inside of Mr. Bodkins’s car reeks of cigarettes and scotch, and there are great swollen drifts of uncorrected English themes piled on the back seat, where they spill and tilt with every twist and turn. Driving this fast seems to have sobered Mr. Bodkins up considerably, and he handles the vehicle with what used to be called aplomb, a Camel Light clamped between his teeth and both hands locked on the wheel. Somewhere inside the glowing dashboard, in stark defiance of all this automotive chaos, Miles Davis is finding his way, softly and mournfully, through “’Round Midnight.”