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breath.
    “Thanks,” he said. “My dad . . . you know, he —”
    “It’s okay,” I said.
    It felt wrong, talking about his dad like that when he was right there. He was a bit slow sometimes. He got confused. But he understood stuff. And he was Liam’s dad.
    Liam turned to him. “Have you got anything else to deliver?”
    His father shook his head. “Weeding the gardens now.” His speech was blurry, slow, as if he’d just been woken from a deep sleep.
    “You want me to walk you back?” Liam pointed up the street to where the town hall sat at the top of the hill, overlooking the town. His father didn’t exactly work there. They just gave him odd jobs, the kind of things he could do when he was having a good day. The kind of jobs where it wouldn’t matter if he got distracted along the way and sat in the town square for half an hour watching the hands on the clock tower turn.
    “Yes. Good.” His father nodded.
    Liam turned to me. “Thanks for not telling. He needs the job.”
    “That’s okay.” I tipped the broken pieces into the front pocket of my bag, listening to them clatter dully down on top of one another. “He really didn’t like that pot.”
    “It’s not that,” Liam began. “It’s just —”
    “I was kidding,” I said quickly. I pulled one pigtail around to the front and squeezed droplets of water out onto the sidewalk.
    Liam stared down at the dark patches on the sidewalk, then up at me. “You told Ellen you did your six.”
    I shrugged. “Yeah.”
    “I just came from the pool. I didn’t see you.”
    “Oh?” I fiddled absently with the zipper on my backpack. “You must have missed me. I’m always there.”
    “I know. That’s why . . .” He trailed off. “Never mind.” He nodded toward his father, who had begun shuffling slowly up the street. “I’d better get going.”
    “Yeah, me too. Hang my towel and stuff.”
    “Okay, so . . . see you at school, then.” He paused. “Maybe I’ll catch you at the pool after?”
    “Yeah, maybe.”
    As Liam hurried to catch up with his father, I went over and retrieved my bike. Then I jumped on the pedals and headed away down the hill, glad to be going in the opposite direction so he couldn’t see my face.

“Hang your towel?”
    “Yep.”
    Mom and Hannah were at the kitchen table, staring at the screen of Hannah’s laptop.
    Dad was in the studio with the door closed, which meant one of two things — either he was doing detail work on his plates and didn’t want to be interrupted or he was working on one of his wacky heads and didn’t want Mom to see.
    “It’s coming together,” Hannah said. “See?”
    I leaned between them and watched as she scrolled slowly through the pages she had laid out on the screen.
    On the Move
    A Town Reborn
    New Beginnings
    Out with the Old, In with the New
    Lower Grange Says Yes! to Progress
    “It looks good,” I said. And it did. It was slick and professional. There were clean, crisp borders around the scanned photos and newspaper clippings. The text Hannah had added wrapped over and between them in a way that looked right, as if the pages hadn’t been put together by someone but had always been there. There was something strange, though. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but as Hannah scrolled further and further, past smiling faces and tall, leafy trees, I realized.
    All the headlines were happy and shiny, all about progress and improvement and sparkling new swimming pools.
    “Where’s the rest?” I asked.
    Hannah frowned. “What do you mean?”
    “You know,” I said. “About the protests and everything.”
    I had read about it, back when I was
Mom’s little historian
. About the arguments and the angry town meetings.
    It hadn’t all been happy and shiny, the way it was on the screen.
    Some people had been furious about it. They had fought to keep the town, at least at first.
    There were groups formed to protect historical buildings and the old trees in the surrounding