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film to send in?”
    We mailed it for him when he did—gave the film to my aunt Lily, since she was the postmistress and went into the office every weekday—and I usually carried around the prints when they came back until Toby and I crossed paths. We had never once opened the package, though I was sometimes tempted. When Toby wanted us to see what he had done, he offered.
    One time he had showed me a batch that featured a red-tailed hawk with a rabbit in its beak, a thunderhead glazed with evening light, a deer napping in a patch of mayapples. I had never known anyone quiet enough to approach a sleeping deer. Nor had I known any hungry man who would shoot one with a camera instead of a gun.
    He took a little spool out of his pocket and handed it to me. I gave him the bundle of food.
    â€œDo you still have some film?”
    He nodded. Every time the photographs came back to us, there were two fresh rolls in the package. Kodak keeping its word.
    He shifted the guns on his back a little. Didn’t turn to leave right away, as he usually did.
    I waited.
    He reached into his pocket. “This is yours,” he said, handing me a penny. It was warm when I took it.
    I recalled Betty searching through the ivy along the trail to school. Toby must have been watching from the trees.
    I put the penny in my own pocket.
    Toby waited some more, in an almost hopeful way. If he knew that it was my penny, then he had seen Betty hit me. Perhaps he had heard her threats. But he had not intervened.
    If he was waiting for me to tell him about it, to ask for his help, I couldn’t. I just wasn’t sure how I felt about all that.
    With a last little nod, Toby turned and walked away, his guns and boots making their simple music. How he stilled it at will was beyond me. I had never yet been able to surprise so much as a milk cow, let alone a doe.
    I stayed for a bit and watched him make his way back across the turned ground between the strawberry patch and the woods, dipping and rising a little as he walked against the grain of the furrows, like a boat crossing a small sea.
    On my way back down the lane I paused at the sight of my house in the growing darkness, lit from within, and wondered if Toby ever stood where I did, saw what I saw.
    Fingering the penny in my pocket, I thought that perhaps he did.

    I found my father sitting on the back step. He always seemed to be there when I returned from taking Toby some supper. “And how was Toby tonight?” he asked as he followed me into the house.
    â€œSame as ever,” I said. “Quiet.”
    â€œI do like that about him,” my father said. “But you should tell me if he ever worries you, Annabelle.”
    Which startled me. “Like how?” I said.
    My father shrugged. “Anything at all.”
    â€œLike if he seems sick or if he’s hurt, you mean?”
    He answered by putting his hand on the top of my head and smiling a little.
    â€œGo on and do your homework now,” he said.
    But first I went in search of my aunt Lily, who would send in the film that Toby had given me, neither of us knowing that, on that small spool, another piece of trouble was waiting for someone to find it.

    As I got ready for bed that night, I examined my aching hip and the bruise that Betty had given me. It looked like a red cucumber, not yet gone to black, sore to the touch.
    And I made up my mind right then that she would not have Aunt Lily’s sweater frog. It wasn’t possible that even a girl like Betty would hurt my brothers, or me, beyond a bruise shaped like a cucumber. That sort of thing didn’t happen. And knowing that Toby might be nearby gave me some reassurance. I was certain that he wouldn’t let anything really bad happen to me or my brothers. If he was nearby at the time. If he saw it happening.
    And if I did get another bruise in the bargain, I would tell my mother. She would know what to do.

    When my brothers ran off ahead of me