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looking out the window at a desk-sized balcony and a postage stamp-sized swimming pool below, "but Mrs Hidalgo would probably find out, and your mother would blow up. Best defuse the bomb before it starts spluttering."
    Jules was silent; then Kate heard her sigh. "You're as bad as Al," she complained. "Okay, just let me just dump these books. You want to see my room?"
    "Sure," said Kate. Jules caught up her backpack and led Kate to the other end of the very ordinary apartment. The room, as Kate had suspected, was not ordinary. It was, in fact, like no other teenage bedroom she'd ever seen, and in the course of her professional life she had seen quite a few.
    To begin with, it was tidy. Not compulsively so, but beneath a minor accumulation of papers, books, and Coke cans, things were obviously in their assigned and logical places. The shelves were free of dust, and the bed had even been made.
    The room was very Jules. The top end of the bed was buried under an arrangement of stuffed animals; on the foot of the bed were two books, each of them weighing at least five pounds. The one on the top was a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. A high shelf, running around three sides of the room, was solid with more toys, teddy bears in the full gamut of pastels, a grouping of stuffed cows and another of elephants, and so on through the bestiary. The shelves below that held books - paperback novels on the higher shelves, solid books lower down; tomes such as few adults had even held were down at waist level. This was a logical-enough arrangement in earthquake country - some of those books would kill a person if they fell from a height of eight feet - but she was amused to see a collection of old and obviously much loved picture books shoulder-to-shoulder with a collection of glossy coffee table art books. The cross between childhood naivete and adult sophistication extended to the walls as well: Three framed prints from the pages of
Goodnight Moon
were arranged on one wall, facing a poster of a Renaissance woman's face on the other, an ethereal blond portrait with the name of a German museum underneath.
    Jules had dropped her backpack on the desk and gone across to open the door of a wire cage. A black-and-white rat came blinking out onto his mistress's hand, but Kate was distracted by a piece of paper that had been pinned up to the corkboard over the desk, on which was printed the word
sesquipedalian
.
    "What's that?" she asked, pointing.
    "That's my word for the day," Jules told her matter-of-factly. She had been cuddling the rat to her chin, and she now kissed his pointy nose and allowed him to scramble onto her shoulder. "It means long words. Literally, it refers to something a foot and a half long." She took a peanut from a jar and held it up to her shoulder. Kate watched the rat manipulate the nut between his delicate paws and nibble it down to nothing, and she wondered briefly how to respond to the word of the day before deciding that she didn't actually have to.
    "What's his name?" she asked instead.
    "Ratty."
    "I loved
The Wind in the Willows
when I was a kid," Kate agreed.
    "Actually, his full name is Ratiocinate," said Jules, putting him back in the cage with another nut. "But I call him Ratty."
    Kate laughed aloud and followed Jules back to the kitchen. The girl looked into the refrigerator. "Would you like a Coke?" she offered. "Or I could make you some coffee. Mrs Hidalgo never has anything but juices to drink; she believes in healthy living." It sounded like a quote, as did many of Jules's remarks. Kate was not actually thirsty, and she didn't much like Coke either, but without knowing why, she found herself accepting the offer. She and Jules stood in the kitchen for a while, talking about the apartment and drinking from the cans, until eventually Kate suggested they should be going downstairs.
    Then, on their way out of the apartment, an odd thing happened, one that would have made little impression on Kate had it not been