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and stuff. If you were a Cavalier, you’d be fancier. Like you’d have an earring.”
    She gave Jasper a dirty look and whacked some hay viciously with her sword.
    “And I do so speak French.”
    “If Journey was a mechanical device,” Jasper said, “she’d be a Kalashnikov automatic rifle.”
    He glared at Journey.
    “And you don’t.”
    These kids should be in an institution,
I thought. The kind with padded walls where they don’t let you use anything but plastic knives and forks.
    “We play Cavaliers and Roundheads all the time,” Journey said. “Except when we’re doing the Crusaders and the Saracens or Attila the Hun and the barbarian hordes. When we do the Crusaders, Jasper is always Richard the Lionheart. He doesn’t like being a Saracen because then he has to have a harem full of wives. Would you want to have a harem full of wives?”
    “No,” I said feelingly. I remembered what Peter Reilly went through with his first five serious girlfriends.
    “Nobody would,” Jasper said to Journey. “I told you.”
    “If Jasper was a blanket,” Journey said, “he would be a cold wet blanket.”
    “So where did you move here from?” I said.
    “Jasper says he is a member of an alien race,” Journey said. “He is from a galaxy far far away and is only here observing this planet until the mother ship comes to take him home.”
    It made me nervous how much sense that made to me.
    “But Isabelle says that’s crap,” Journey said cheerfully.
    Which was the first time I heard Isabelle’s name.
    I said, “Who’s Isabelle?”

H ere’s something Isadora Duncan once said: “Don’t let them tame you.”
    Isadora was a dancer, but she hated classical ballet. Instead she invented modern dance, which involved barefoot people wearing togas and pretending to be the wind. When she wasn’t wearing her toga, she wore long flowing silk scarves.
    She was wearing one of those scarves in 1927 when she leaped into a car, made a grand gesture, and cried, “Good-bye, my friends, I am off to glory!” When the car started up, the scarf somehow got tangled up in the wheel, yanked tight, and broke her neck.
    I could see Isabelle dying like that. Wild and beautiful and kind of crazy, but untamed. And making a grand gesture. That’s something Isabelle would do.
    By the time I met Isabelle, it was the second week in June and school was just out for the summer. The lilacs had come and gone by then, the blackflies had come and stayed, and the temperature had gone so fast from cool to hot that Corrigan’s Hardware Store had to scramble, setting out window screens and ice-cube trays and fans.
    On the last day of school we all got rowdy on the back seat of the bus on the way home, yelling and laughing and shoving each other around. Partly it was because it was just a great day outside and there was a whole summer in front of us, and partly, at least in my case, it was because I knew that for two whole months now I wouldn’t have to worry about my untapped potential and my crappy grades and how disgusted my dad was going to be when I got like a 10 on the PSAT. So we were whooping and hollering like idiots, and punching each other in the arm, especially Peter Reilly with his Bowflex biceps.
    When Walter got off the bus at Cemetery Hill Road, we yanked the window down and started throwing Ryan Baker’s gourmet jelly beans at him, pinging them off his shoulders and the back of his head, the ones with flavors nobody liked, like mango and grape jelly. Walter didn’t even look up, just hunched over and trudged off down the road, lugging his funky briefcase.
    Peter Reilly yelled after him, “Hey, Wally! What are you going to do this summer? Read
Play-Doh
?” and Mickey Roberts yelled, “Say hi to the Living Dead!” and all the rest of us went, “Woo-oo-oo-oo!” like horror-movie noises, but Walter didn’t so much as turn around. I thought for a minute how he looked sad and lonely there, scuffing along in the dust where the