In the morning after Johnny’s first night in my dorm room, I pick up his clothes off the floor and hang his jeans in the wardrobe. I ball up his socks and drop them in one of the drawers that slide out from under his bed. Yet Johnny sleeps on.

I look around the room. It is tidy and plain. I have not personalized it in any way other than to hang a drawing of a plant cell, which I did in pen and ink. Thelma has implored me to brighten up the place. With Johnny lying in the second bed, my dorm room now seems more personal (despite his dark, furrowed brow).

It is six thirty. I go to shower. I check my back in the mirror for a gunshot scar, but there is none. Afterward, I go to the roof of the Frank and Joe to measure the growth of glass in the shed’s window. When I come back, just after seven, Johnny is still asleep. I write my new roommate a note: “Dear Johnny, I went to the cafeteria to get us breakfast. Back soon. Hope you slept well.” I sign the note “Oliver,” though I realize I will never be anybody but Boo to him.

I stick plastic containers into a paper bag to fetch us oatmeal. Townies prefer to call it gruel because they claim it is grueling to eat. I exit our dorm, and as I cut across a playing field to reach the cafeteria, I see a trio of boys laughing and kicking a soccer ball around. They can laugh and play because nobody shot them to death, I think. But then I realize I am being unfair: I do not know how they died, and perhaps their deaths were as violent as my own.

On the other side of the field, I walk through the front doors of the Sophie Wender School, which houses the local cafeteria. I immediately need to sit on a bench in the lobby because something occurs to me that makes me dizzy and weak. I wonder if Gunboy’s bullet is still inside me, perhaps even embedded in my holey heart. My breathing comes in gasps. I remove the plastic containers from my paper bag and stick my nose and mouth into its opening. The bag inflates and deflates with my breathing.

“You okay, Oliver?”

I look up and see Esther Haglund.

“Are you sick?”

I plan to say I am hunky-dory, but I take the bag away from my face and say instead, “I was murdered.”

“What?”

“I was murdered,” I repeat. “Somebody I do not even know shot me. I assume I died on the spot. The bullet must have hit a vital organ—or maybe it even blew my brains out.”

I think of you, Father and Mother. Did you learn the news by telephone or by a police visit at Clippers? I must avoid such thoughts; otherwise I will never recover my breath.

Esther sits beside me on the bench as townies traipse through the lobby of the Sophie. Gangs of thirteen-year-olds jostle, holler, and hoot. They are as happy-go-lucky as my fellow students must have been at Helen Keller in the moments before Gunboy opened fire.

I put the bag back over my face and breathe in more carbon dioxide as Esther watches. She has widely spaced green eyes, which she blinks at me, but she says not a word. She also is terrible at small talk, despite her position as a do-gooder in training.

I put down the paper bag. “You have nice hair,” I tell her—my attempt at small talk. “I should know because my parents are barbers.”

She examines the ends of a lock as though checking for splits. Then she pushes her hair back and looks me in the eye. “There’s a support group here for murdered kids.”

“Support group?”

“Yeah, they call themselves ‘gommers.’ ‘GOM’ stands for ‘getting over murder.’ A silly name if you ask me. Gommers get together and talk about how they passed. Their anger. Their nightmares. That kind of thing.”

I must look surprised because she says, “You aren’t the only kid here who got murdered, you know. Some gommers consider their death a badge of honor. They lord it over the rest of us. They exaggerate and make their murder more gruesome than it actually was. Hope you don’t do that.”

I tell her I doubt I will, especially since I did not even witness my own shooting. “I would far prefer a heart defect as a cause of death,” I add as I place my plastic containers back in my paper bag. I wonder if a heart defect, common among dwarfs, killed Esther.

Then I stand and say good-bye. I need to fetch breakfast for Johnny and myself.

As I walk away, Esther says, “Wait, Oliver!”

When I turn, she hesitates, but then calls out, “Achondroplasia.” It is her form of dwarfism.