Thelma and Esther accompany us home after Johnny is expelled from the Halloween party. We walk on a street whose name, coincidentally, is Boo Radley Road. It is nine o’clock. The full moon shines and stars twinkle. Both the moon and the stars stay in the exact same place every night. I want to say to Zig, “Change the darn backdrop, will you?” Every decade or two, he apparently does change the arrangement of stars, but we are not due for a new backdrop for several years to come. Forget, however, about trying to locate Draco, Andromeda, Canis Major, Leo, and other earthly constellations: the stars over Town follow different patterns. One of my projects is to map them and create a new system of constellations. Frankly, I am surprised no other townie has thought of doing this.

“Is the sky a trompe l’oeil?” I ask Thelma and Esther as we stroll down a sidewalk lit by streetlamps with round moonlike bulbs sitting atop their stems. Zig turns the lamps on at dusk and turns them off at our curfew of midnight, whereupon the starry sky becomes easier to see. I often scan it at night from atop the Frank and Joe.

“A trump what?” Thelma says.

“An optical illusion,” I say, but she and Esther do not understand. “Maybe Zig hangs a backdrop in the sky to reassure us, to make us think we live in an environment like the one we knew in America.”

“This place is big on illusion,” Thelma says.

We all stop and look into the sky. I think I spot a falling star (in other words, a meteoroid), but in half a second the blip is gone.

Esther says we have the illusion that everything stays the same here, that the buildings around us do not age. Yet the buildings do slowly change over time, she says. Twenty-five years from now, they will have gradually transformed to respect the architectural norms of the day. “We change too,” she says. “Townies who arrived here twenty-five years ago are different from newbies who came last month, like you and Johnny.”

“In what way?” I ask.

“You know more things,” Esther says.

“Like what?” I say.

Thelma answers: “Well, you know about stars like Farrah Fawcett Majors and her bionic man. You know what a light saber is and a lava lamp. You know the words to ‘How Deep Is Your Love?’ and ‘Stayin’ Alive.’ And you know the names of the brothers and sisters on The Brady Bunch.”

“I do not know any of these things,” I tell Thelma.

“Boo is an exception to the rule,” Esther says.

“Johnny probably knows,” I say. I look for him. He walks far ahead by himself, with my ghost sheet tied around his neck. For an instant, he reminds me of myself back in America because I was such a loner. I am at ease with solitude, but I do not believe Johnny is. His present solitude, therefore, is much sadder than my former.

“Is your friend okay?” Esther asks me.

I say I do not know. At least, because of his newborn status, he will not be punished for fighting. Newborns are allowed to make blunders for their first six months, whereas the clown who piled onto me will face the do-good council and be grounded in his dorm room for a day or two.

“It’s Johnny’s American birthday,” Thelma says. “Birthdays are hard on newbies ’cause they don’t turn fourteen. Besides, first months are always hard. My first months, I was a mess. So let’s give poor Johnny time to come around.”

“What about you, Esther?” I ask. “Were you a mess when you arrived?”

Esther tosses her big hair out of her eyes. “Oh, I was ever so grateful.” Here she clasps her hands against her chest and switches her voice to a higher pitch. “Thank you, dear Zig, for giving me an afterlife.” She places her palms together in prayer and adds, “But, my all-powerful, all-knowing deity, does this prepubescent freeze mean I’ll never have a real pair of knockers?”

Thelma lets out a whoop of laughter.

As you know, I do not whoop, chuckle, or giggle, but I do crack smiles. Hence, a smile is cracked.

“Hey! Hey!”

“Slow down!”

“Come back here!”

Our merriment is interrupted by shouts in the night. It is Johnny. He runs toward us, in the all-out sprint he was famous for as a member of the Helen Keller track team. He is chasing a boy on a ten-speed. The cyclist zooms past, and I turn and watch him speed away from us and from Johnny. Under the streetlamps, I see the cyclist has brown hair. And big ears.

Johnny runs past us. With his black mask and flapping white cape, he looks like a superhero. He tries to catch up to the bicycle, but his effort is in vain. He comes to a sudden stop under a streetlamp, and the girls and I hurry toward him. Before we reach him, he turns and jogs back to us. He pants because his five-week coma has left him less physically fit.

He grabs a fistful of my T-shirt and bounces on his toes. Behind his Zorro mask, his eyes are wild.

“Holy f*ck, Boo, it was him!”