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and physics courses—he could have taught them—but next semester he was signed up for a Latin credit. “It’s not even a living language,” he said. “Who the hell reads Latin, outside classical scholars? It’s like learning FORTRAN. All the important texts were translated a long time ago. Does it make me a better person to read Cicero in the original? Cicero, for god’s sake? The Alan Dershowitz of the Roman Republic?”
    I didn’t take any of this too seriously. One of the things we liked to do on these rides was practice the art of complaining. (I had no idea who Alan Dershowitz was; some kid at Jason’s school, I guessed.) But today his mood was volatile, erratic. He stood up on his pedals and biked a little way ahead of us.
    The road to the mall wound past deeply treed lots and pastel houses with manicured gardens and embedded sprinklers that marked the morning air with rainbows. The sunlight might be fake, filtered, but it still broke into colors when it cut through falling water and it still felt like a blessing when we rolled from under the shading oaks onto the glittering white sidewalk.
    Ten or fifteen minutes of easy riding later the top of Bantam Hill Road loomed ahead of us—last obstacle and major landmark on the way to the mall. Bantam Hill Road was steep, but on the other side it was a sweet long glide to the mall’s parking lot. Jase was already a quarter of the way up. Diane gave me a mischievous look.
    “Race you,” she said.
    That was dismaying. The twins had their birthdays in June. Mine was in October. Every summer they were not one but
two
years older than me: the twins had turned fourteen but I was still twelve for another frustrating four months. The difference translated into a physical advantage. Diane must have known I couldn’t beat her up the hill, but she pedaled off anyway and I sighed and tried to pump my creaking old junker into plausible competition. It was no contest. Diane rose up on her gleaming contrivance of etched aluminum, and by the time she reached the upslope she had gained a ferocious momentum. A trio of little girls chalk-marking the sidewalk scurried out of her way. She shot a glance back at me, half encouraging, half taunting.
    The rising road stole back her momentum, but she shifted gears deftly and put her legs to work again. Jason, at the peak, had stopped and balanced himself with one long leg, looking back quizzically. I labored on, but halfway up the hill my ancient bike was swaying more than moving and I was forced to sidle off and walk it the rest of the way up.
    Diane grinned at me when I finally arrived.
    “You win,” I said.
    “Sorry, Tyler. It wasn’t really fair.”
    I shrugged, embarrassed.
    Here the road ended in a cul-de-sac, where residential lots had been sketched with stakes and string but no houses built. The mall lay down a long, sandy decline to the west. A pressed-earth path cut through scrubby trees and berry bushes. “See you at the bottom,” she said, and rolled away again.
     
     
    We left our bikes locked to a rack and entered the glassy nave of the mall. The mall was a reassuring environment, chiefly because it had changed so little since last October. The newspapers and television might still be in high-alert mode, but the mall lived in blessed denial. The only evidence that anything might have gone askew in the larger world was the absence of satellite dish displays at the consumer-electronics chain stores and a surge of October-related titles on the bookstore display racks. Jason snorted at one paperback with a high-gloss blue-and-gold cover, a book that claimed to link the October Event to Biblical prophecy: “The easiest kind of prophecy,” he said, “is the kind that predicts things that have already happened.”
    Diane gave him an aggravated look. “You don’t have to make fun of it just because you don’t believe in it.”
    “Technically, I’m only making fun of the front cover. I haven’t read the