The summer had done something to Owen's legs, and he didn't know what to do about it.
He noticed on the first day of sixth grade, pedaling his BMX down Maple Street at 7:40 in the morning with his glove hooked over the handlebars and his Walkman clipped to his belt. The headphones hung around his neck, leaking a tinny mixtape he'd recorded off the radio, half Top 40 and half the DJ talking over the first ten seconds of every song. His knees came up higher than they used to. The bike felt smaller, like it had shrunk in the garage while he was gone. At the end of August, his mom had measured him against the library's back-office door frame and made a sound like she'd found an overdue book from 1974.
Two and a half inches. In ten weeks.
Owen kept pedaling. The air smelled like salt and low tide, the way it did every morning when the marsh was showing its mud, and a couple of gulls wheeled over the rooftops, complaining about something. This was the year, he told himself. Middle school. Lockers and a different teacher for every subject, and tryouts for the school team in the spring. Six years of rec league, since he was five, with the same coaches and the same kids who all knew he was good. Now he was going to be the best. The star. The one the others looked to when the game was on the line.
He just had to figure out how to be the kind of player people followed. He was good, everyone said so. But being good wasn't the same as being the guy people trusted, and every time he tried to take charge, he got a little knot in his chest, like whatever he said might send everybody the wrong way.
At the corner of Maple and Third, he heard the cruiser before he saw it, the low rumble and the crunch of tires on oyster-shell gravel. Sheriff Woods's tan Crown Victoria rolled up beside him and slowed to a crawl, matching his speed.
The passenger window was down, and a dog's head was already out of it.
"Morning, Owen," Sheriff Woods said, leaning across the seat. He was a big man with a gray mustache and a face like a catcher's mitt, creased and kind. His hat sat on the dash. "Big day."
"Yes, sir."
"You grow?"
"A little."
"A little." The sheriff laughed, a deep, rumbling laugh, and the dog barked once, sharp and happy, like he'd been in on the joke the whole time.
Milo was eight months old and mostly legs. He was mostly German shepherd and something else, nobody was sure what, with a black saddle on his back and ears that hadn't decided yet whether to stand up or flop. Sheriff Woods had found him in a ditch off Route 9 in February, shivering, with a torn ear and no collar. He'd brought him back to the station "just until we find his people." Nobody ever came. By April, the dog had his own water bowl behind the front desk and his own spot on the passenger seat.
Owen leaned over and Milo licked his entire ear.
"Gross," Owen said, grinning.
"He likes you," the sheriff said. "Dogs know. They can tell who's got a good heart."
Owen's face got warm, and he looked at the road. His dad said things like that sometimes, between patients, in the kitchen, in the voice of a man who spent his days listening to people's hearts. But his dad was a doctor and it was his job. The sheriff just said it, straight out, like it was no big deal.
"You and your friends stay out of trouble today," Sheriff Woods said. "First day's tough enough without extra credit. Your brother giving you any trouble?"
Owen's grin flattened. "Kane's Kane."
"Mm." The sheriff didn't push. He'd had to bring Kane home twice already this summer, once for the quarry and once for something nobody talked about. "Well. You're the good one in that house, and don't let anybody tell you different. And Owen." The sheriff's voice dropped, just a little. "Anything strange, anything at all, you come tell me. Understand?"
Owen blinked. Strange how? But the cruiser was already pulling ahead, the sheriff lifting two fingers off the wheel, Milo's tail whipping back and forth in the window, and then it turned the corner and was gone.
Owen sat there for a second, one foot on the curb. The street was quiet, almost too quiet for a Tuesday morning. A dog barked somewhere, then stopped, as if someone had put a hand over its mouth.
He shook it off and pedaled.
They had a spot, the four of them. Had since kindergarten, which Owen sometimes thought was too long ago to count and sometimes thought was just yesterday. It was the big oak at the corner of Fifth and Elm, where the sidewalk split and the roots had pushed it up into a lumpy hill, perfect for sitting. Mrs. Pruitt's kindergarten class had walked past it every day on the way to the library, and one afternoon Hanna had stopped dead in the middle of the line, pointed up, and said, "There's a nest with eggs in it." Everyone else was looking at the library. Hanna was already looking at the tree.
That was Hanna. She noticed things.
She was there now, sitting on a root with her knees pulled up and a green notebook open on top of them. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail so tight it looked painful. She didn't look up when Owen skidded to a stop on the gravel.
"You're two minutes late," she said.
"How do you know? You don't have a watch."
"The bus went by at 7:42. It's 7:44." She finally glanced up over the top of her glasses, and her eyes went wide. "Owen. You're so tall."
"Yeah, thanks, I know."
"No, like, tall." She looked him up and down like she was taking measurements. Then she wrote something in the notebook.
"Are you writing me down?"
"I'm observing." She said it the way her dad said it on Wednesdays at science club, like it was a serious word. Hanna's dad taught chemistry at the high school, and he ran the science club at the middle school every week, so she'd practically grown up in that classroom. Hanna talked less than anyone Owen knew, but when she did say something, it usually turned out to be right.
"Leave him alone, Hanna," said a voice from the other side of the tree. "Some of us are still waiting for our growth spurt."
Mikey dropped from a low branch, landed on both feet, and spun into a karate stance, one knee up, both hands raised. He was shorter than Owen now, by a full head, but he moved like he was taller, with his chin up and his hands always going. He wore a bright green hoodie even though it was seventy degrees already, because Mikey believed in making an entrance.
"Behold," he said. "The man himself. Owen 'Tree Trunk' McCarthy."
"Don't."
"Owen 'The Redwood.'"
"I will push you into the road."
"You can try, Redwood. I've got a black belt in nine different ways to dodge."
"You have a brown belt in one."
"Yet I dodge with style." Mikey whipped his hands in a fast, tight figure eight, two invisible sticks and a chain, and finished by snapping his arm under his elbow and catching nothing. He bowed. "Sensei Nunchucks has been left at home, locked in my closet, where Principal Dunmore can't confiscate him. But the form lives on."
"You've been practicing that all summer," Hanna said.
"Every day. Four hundred reps."
"You hit yourself in the head three times last week," Owen said.
"That's called training."
Owen shoved him, and Mikey went down laughing, and for a second it was like nothing had changed at all. Fifth grade, fourth grade, all the way back. The four of them against the world.
Mikey popped back up and brushed the dirt off his hoodie, still smiling, but something flickered in his face when he looked toward the school. Owen knew the look. Mikey got it any time somebody laughed at him instead of with him. His dad ran the bank on Main Street, his parents had come all the way from Cuba, and Mikey had spent his whole life being the funny one, because the funny one never had to be the serious one. Owen had never said it out loud, but he knew Mikey wanted people to take him seriously, just once. He just didn't know how to ask.
"Okay, real talk," Mikey said, rubbing his hands together. "Friday. I've got a master plan. We hit the mall right after school, Orange Julius first, then the arcade. Somebody finally brought Mortal Kombat to the Sunshine Arcade, and I'm going to destroy everyone."
"You're going to lose to a fifth grader," Owen said.
"Then we hit Blockbuster and I make them tell me again when The Sandlot comes out."
"Nobody's asking them again."
"I am. Every week."
He looked around. "Where's Sam?"
"Here," Samantha said.
She was standing a few feet away, near the fence, with her hands in the pockets of her jeans and her backpack slung over one shoulder. Owen hadn't seen her come up. She did that, Samantha. She had a way of arriving quietly, and her clothes were always perfectly ironed, her braids perfectly neat, her shoes perfectly white, because in her house, every detail was watched. Her dad ran the hardware store and preached on Sundays, and her mom stood beside him at every sermon. Samantha walked like she was balancing a book on her head, because somebody had once made her.
But she wasn't looking at them. She was looking up, at the telephone wire running along the side of Elm Street, and for just a second, with her face tilted up and the morning light on it, she didn't look careful at all. She looked like somebody who wanted to climb the pole.
"Did you guys hear that?" she asked.
"Hear what?"
"The buzzing." She tilted her head. "Like a, I don't know. A hum. It was loud a second ago."
Owen listened. He heard gulls, a lawnmower somewhere, the far-off grind of the school bus, a faint scratch of music from the headphones around his neck.
"I don't hear anything," Mikey said.
"It stopped." Samantha frowned and pulled a small black notebook from her back pocket. She wrote something down. Hanna looked over her shoulder and went still.
"You're keeping one too?" Hanna said.
"Since June." Samantha looked at the green notebook in Hanna's lap. "You?"
"Since June."
They stared at each other. Owen had the strong, strange feeling of walking in on the middle of a conversation.
"Wait," Mikey said. "What are you two writing about?"
"Nothing," Hanna and Samantha said at the same time.
"That's the worst nothing I've ever heard."
"It's nothing," Samantha repeated. "We'll be late."
She turned and started walking toward school, fast, like she didn't want to be asked again. Hanna closed her notebook with a snap, shoved it into her bag, and followed.
Owen and Mikey traded a look.
"They're totally hiding something," Mikey whispered.
"Yeah."
"We should find out."
"Yeah," Owen said, but he was thinking about the sheriff, and the way his voice had changed at the end. Anything strange, anything at all.
He didn't say that out loud. If he said it, he'd be telling everyone what to do, and what if he got it wrong?
Gray Hollow Middle School looked bigger than he remembered from the orientation tour in June, a long, low brick building with a flagpole out front and a banner over the doors that said WELCOME BACK, OSPREYS! The parking lot was a mess of buses and minivans and kids who all seemed taller than him, even now. A boy near the bike rack wore a Chicago Bulls jacket with the tags still on. Two girls were trading friendship bracelets.
"Okay," Owen muttered, and for a second his stomach dropped. Maybe he wasn't taller after all. Maybe everybody else had just grown too.
Mikey nudged him with an elbow. "Hey. Redwood."
"What?"
"Don't freak out. Whatever's in there, we've got it." Mikey said it the way he said everything, like a joke, but he didn't look at Owen when he said it. He was staring at the doors too.
Owen looked at Hanna, quiet and watchful on one side. At Samantha on the other, jaw set, eyes sharp. At Mikey, grinning a little too hard.
Six years. Nobody else had that. Whatever sixth grade was going to throw at them, he wasn't walking in alone.
Behind them, from somewhere far across town, a dog began to howl. One long, lonely note that rose and rose and then cut off, all at once.
Nobody else seemed to hear it. They were already heading for the doors.
But Owen stopped for half a second, with one hand on the cold metal handle. Out past the football field, past the last row of houses, the pines and marsh grass at the edge of town were standing very still, and above them the sky had a strange, faint shimmer, like heat coming off a road.
Then it was gone.
He pulled the door open and went in.