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way of looking into you and seeing what’s there. Gray eyes, a touch bluer than mine. He has a great hook shot, but decided he wants to concentrate on acoustical physics and meteorology. He doesn’t know if he will be a sound engineer or a weatherman, but I can talk about medicine with him and he follows my line of thought. “We’ve been recording a saw-whet owl,” he said. “There’s one living in a cypress near Pescadero, off Highway One. Four nights in a row,” he added. That explained the sounds of surf I had heard on the hospital phone.
    He stayed right next to me, close, especially when a crack in the sidewalk made its way toward us, and when we passed a gardener buzz sawing a juniper into submission, I thought Rowan would scoop me into his arms and carry me. I dug an elbow into him and he loosened his grip. I marched ahead for a while, all the way up the hill in the June sun.
    We reached the stairs down to the multi-terraced campus, and I held on to the rail. I had a dazzling three-second pain in my head.
    Pain on, pain off, like a blinking red warning . Aside from a scraped knee now and then, I had never been injured before in my life. Dr. Breen had cautioned me to expect double vision, but on the fourth day after my accident, the day before Dad was due back from Napili Bay with his bride, I knew I had to hide the way I felt or I would be hospitalized.
    I took the stairs two at a time, with a show of my usual spirit, but by the time I was heading down the open-air corridor, past the bougainvillea trellis, the world was swinging in slow, nauseating circles.
    Lloyd-Fairhill is a prep school, privately endowed by rich graduates. Our school doesn’t have a workaday PE department with an asphalt basketball court. It has a Jacuzzi room, and a sauna, and an arena for the swimming/diving/water polo teams with a THX sound system so you could hear your name spoken from all directions at once as you tugged your swimsuit straight. The problem with the school was that the campus was too small for all the art galleries and faculty lounges crammed into it. Softballs were always damaging the solar energy panels on the math wing, and when barn swallows built their nests over the cafeteria, you had to duck under their fluttering, swooping wings on your way to get a bowl of vegetarian chowder.
    I had attended the Oakland Public Schools, but my mom had switched me to private schools partly so I could compete in water sports, and partly so I could get an education good enough to shoehorn me into a pre-med program when I got to college. It wasn’t a snap decision, but Mom finally had heard enough of my descriptions of what went on in the OPS classrooms. I had an eighth-grade history teacher who taught us that the U.S. government salted the clouds over the Atlantic so all the rain would fall at sea, causing Ethiopians to die of drought. When she heard about this, Mom decided it was time to send me to an improved environment.
    I would be a junior in September. After two years at Lloyd-Fairhill, I still felt awkward among kids who ate fresh-baked croissants for breakfast. My mother wrote out a check to the academy every month without a word of complaint. She was always off delivering bromeliads to model homes in Blackhawk and Pinole, and when my dad wasn’t too busy sorting out his clients’ lives there was a monthly check from him. We couldn’t make it without the extra cash from Dad.
    The doors of the academy are all painted a dazzling blue, and they are wired to a security system. Police arrested two guys over Christmas vacation for peering through the rhododendron and just thinking—merely considering—jimmying the computer lab door.
    Miss P answered my knock, and I was glad to see Denise there, perched on her chair with her chin on her knees. She gave me a smile, but didn’t go so far as to say good morning—she saw the look in my eyes.
    â€œYou don’t want to see