The following morning, after I'd assured myself that my guts were still in the right places and hadn't been left behind in Goldenrock Cemetery, I biked over to Adam's. The day was actually cloudy. There was no sun out in the sky, but it was still as hot as ever. It might have been worse, actually, because the air was humid and made everything sticky. I started sweating right when I left my house, before I'd even started to do anything to make myself sweat. Those were the worst kind of summer days—the real muggy ones. You couldn't escape the awfulness of them unless you wanted to sit in your basement all day and not move a muscle. That, of course, was exactly what Adam was doing when I reached his house.

His mom let me in, and I wandered down the basement stairs where Adam was propped like a mannequin on the sofa, watching some sort of anime. Those Japanese cartoons. I liked them sometimes. Adam liked them all the time. To me, they all started to look the same after a while.

"What's going on?" I asked him.

He didn't even answer me. He just kept staring at the TV like a zombie. Thinking of zombies made me remember why I was there.

"Hey, I wanted to talk about last night."

He rolled a little so he could rest his chin on one arm. "What about it?"

"I'm just still confused. I don't really get why you think your mom is getting stuff from a dead guy. There's probably more than one person named Ted Barnes. And how did you know to go looking for his grave, anyway?"

Adam clicked the TV off, which I was grateful for. I couldn't compete with anime. "You know stuff has been coming for my mom, right?" he asked quietly, sitting up all the way. I nodded my head. "Yeah," he continued, "and it's all been sent by a guy named Ted Barnes."

"Right. You told me that."

"Well, there's never any return address on the envelopes—just this guy's name, ok? So I wanted to know who the heck he was. It's just not right, my mom getting stuff like that. But I didn't want to ask her to her face because she keeps acting like nothing's even coming in the mail worth reading; she wouldn't tell me anything about it if I mentioned the name. But you can find anything online. So I went and looked up Ted Barnes and tons of stuff came up. I mean tons. That's a really popular name, I guess. But I narrowed my search by putting in her company's name, where she works. Because I thought maybe it would be someone she works with. Well, nothing came up with that. So then I typed in Goldenrock, and up comes this old death notice about this guy who died in a car accident around ten years back. That's when I figured we should go check it out, just to make certain there really was a guy named Ted Barnes buried in the cemetery. That was last night. There. Now you know as much as I do."

It was an interesting story, really, but I was still doubtful. "Come on, Adam," I said. "You just said that there were tons of guys named Ted Barnes. So how do you know it isn't someone in another city or state who your mom met somewhere? Maybe he lives out of town. He could be anyone."

Adam was going to be stubborn. "No. I know it's this guy. I know it."

"How? You have no idea. Just because some person with the same name is buried here doesn't mean that it's the exact guy."

"Shut up, Cole. I know what I'm talking about. I just feel that it's him."

"Yeah? Then how do you explain your mom getting mail from him? Because I don't know about you, but all the dead people I know can't exactly write letters and put them in the mailbox. They pretty much just sit and rot underground."

He snorted. "I bet that's not what you thought last night."

Now he was turning into a pain. "Oh, and like you weren't thinking the same thing. Like you weren't freaked out by that . . . thing."

"I'm not saying I wasn't. I'm just saying at least I didn't think it was a ghost or a dead body. I knew it was an actual person."

I scowled. "Maybe I thought that too!"

"No. You didn't."

"You're not in my brain. How do you know what's in my head?"

"Because I know you, Cole. I've known you forever. I know you better than you think."

Standing up, I felt my face flushing. "Whatever, Adam. Then if you know me, what am I thinking about doing right now?"

He laid back down on the sofa and flicked the TV back on, not bothered at all by my rising temper. "Probably that you want to kick me or something. But you're too scared. You're just going to leave instead."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah."

"I . . . you're such a loser sometimes," I blurted. "I'm going home. See you in school." I started up the stairs. When I was about halfway up, I added, "And I wasn't thinking about kicking you—I was thinking I'd like to punch a hole in your stupid TV!"

Right after I'd said that, fizzing came from the basement. Then came the sounds of shattering glass and sparking electrical wires. Adam cried out something angry, but I didn't turn back. I kept going until I reached the ground floor. I didn't have to see what had happened, because somehow I already knew. I didn't have to see the TV to know that it had burst.

The more I thought of what Adam had said about me, the more annoyed it made me. How did he think he knew everything? I didn't think I knew everything. I was pretty certain, in fact, that I didn't know much at all. So what kind of a jerk was he to think he could guess what my brain thought? He was starting to get more and more moody and irritating. I didn't know if I could handle his weirdness for much longer. What sort of a friend was he, anyway? I'd never not liked Adam as much as I did at that time. So what if he didn't have a dad! Did that give him the right to treat me like I was stupid? I was getting tired of just being there when he felt like having me around. That wasn't what a friend was. He was getting less and less willing to do the stuff that I wanted to do and more and more obsessed with watching over his mom. He was acting like she needed to be protected or something, which was just stupid. Mrs. Nyler was an adult. She could do what she wanted. If that meant getting mail from some guy, so what? I mean, I have to admit that if my dad left and my mom started to get flowers and all, I'd be mad. But Adam's dad had been gone for so long that it was like he'd never even had one. So what if his mom got some mail to make her happy once in a while? The whole situation was starting to drive me crazy. Adam just needed to mind his own business.

Wednesday of the next week, while Adam was once again sitting on the gym bleachers for not changing, Dylan came over to me. We were heading outside to play baseball (which was going to be a nightmare in the overcast, humid heat) when he wandered up. "I wanted to tell you something," he said.

I glanced around. His cronies were nowhere in sight. I wondered if they'd dropped out of summer school. "Ok. What?"

"Remember, um . . . not so long ago, when your house was, uh, TP'd?"

Somewhere inside I laughed. "Yeah."

He half-tripped walking up the cement stairs to the baseball field. "Well . . . that was me. Me and some other guys."

Normally, I wouldn't have known what to say to a confession like that, but the day was hot and I was kind of in a sour mood, so I didn't care if I spoke my mind. "I know, Dylan. I saw you. I peeked out my window that night and saw you in my yard with the toilet paper and everything."

He was shocked. It was great to see. His eyes widened and his mouth formed a lower-case "o." He grabbed my arm before I could step ahead. "Why didn't you ever say anything, then? Nobody ever caught me! I mean, they took me to the station, but that was because some old fogey lady said she saw me wandering around after curfew. It wasn't because of the mess at your house. And Adam was there, too. They thought he'd done it!"

"Yeah, I know all that."

"So why didn't you say anything? You could've gotten me in trouble so fast!"

Now, I really didn't know what to say to that. I would've spoken my mind if I'd known what it was saying. But it still wasn't made up on the subject. I still didn't know why I hadn't turned in Dylan. Actually, I wished he hadn't asked me about that part. All I could say to him was, "I don't know."

"Oh. Well thanks."

"Don't thank me. That's weird."

He shrugged. "Ok. Consider yourself unthanked."

After that, he jogged out to third base and I lined up with the rest of us losers trying to just make it through an hour-and-a-half of batting practice. I stood with my back against the chain-link fence for most of the game, letting other guys pass me up in line until the coach caught me and made me bat. When it was my turn in the outfield, I just hoped the ball wouldn't come my way. It only did once, and I didn't catch it. I let the guy next to me run after the thing, even though he was a lot farther from it than I was. The rest of the batters pretty much sucked, probably because they cared about playing as much as I did.

I just really didn't want to be there. My mind started to slosh with all the thoughts swimming inside it. The heat melted my brain, and I began to feel like someone was boiling wax inside my skull. Dylan Doyle practically apologizing to me. Adam becoming a jerk. Me being able to bust a TV. Mrs. Nyler getting mail from a dead guy. The world was turning inside-out. Or at least, my world was. And it was mostly because of some papers Adam and I had found in a tree house. It was already the end of July, and if things kept getting weirder, I'd probably be heading into eighth grade with no friends at all and the ability to ignite the science labs on fire with the blink of my eyes. That would be kind of cool, actually. Maybe Jessie, the girl with the long brown hair, would think that was cool, too. Me saving her from having to dissect a frog (which I was sure she would think was disgusting) by bringing the amphibians on all the tables to life with my electrical powers. They'd be dancing on the counters and all. The biology teacher would freak and jump out the window and everyone would cheer because there'd be no more class. Jessie would cheer the most. I'd be her hero.

That nice daydream made the rest of gym bearable, anyway. Class was over before I knew it. Somebody actually had to tell me to start heading in, because I was still standing in the outfield mind-wandering while they were all going down the stairs and back into the building.

In the locker room, I changed out of my smelly gym clothes into my soon-to-be-smelly normal clothes. Balling up my gym shorts and T-shirt, I stuffed them into my metal locker and slammed the thing shut. My lock was broken, so I didn't bother with it. Not like I cared. I figured if somebody wanted to steal my gym clothes, they could have them. They'd have to be desperate to take the sweat-crusty things.

When I trumped back out into the gym, all ready to walk home, I saw that Adam wasn't sitting on the bleachers anymore. He wasn't anywhere. Some kid told me he'd already left. I was mad, but I wasn't surprised. He was starting to spend more and more time alone. He didn't want to walk home with me. Why would I think he did? It sort of hurt, though, too. I was trying to tell myself that I didn't care as I walked out of the school building, but then Dylan thankfully brought my lying mind off track.

"Yo, Cole," he cried, hopping over to me. "You care if I walk with you part of the way? Brandon and Keith weren't here today. They're skipping again."

I stared at him for a minute, the leprechaun with the moppy hair and weird dolls inhabiting his backyard. Dead parents and a mean streak that had oddly disappeared. "Yeah. No problem."