Johnny Henzel drew my portrait in sixth grade while we and our classmates at Lakeview Elementary sat under our desks waiting for the roof to be ripped off the school. A tornado had been spotted in Cook County that day. The sky outside had turned sickly green, and winds were howling. We heard the wind clearly because in weather like this the windows were kept open so they would not blow in and injure us with flying glass.

As my classmates and I took refuge under our desks on the dusty wooden floor (what a slapdash job the janitors had done), Oscar Stanley and Fred Winchester wondered aloud about deadly tornadoes that had struck the state in the past. I told them about a twister that had stormed through the county decades before, torn the roof off a town hall, and sucked away a town councillor, who was found three days later, at the bottom of a pond a mile away.

“He was wearing only his underwear,” I said. “His other clothes had been ripped from his body.”

Mr. Proman stuck a ruler under my desk and poked me in my ribs. “Shut your fat trap, Mr. Dalrymple,” he said, because Andrea Dolittle and Patsy Hyde were whimpering from fear. Poor Andrea Dolittle was known to vomit unexpectedly (for instance, she upchucked during the testing of our blood types).

Johnny Henzel sat in front of me that year. It was the first year of elementary school that he and I were in the same class. We did not talk much to each other. In any case, I paid my peers little more mind than I paid other bland objects in the classroom, like a blackboard eraser or a wastepaper basket. The one thing of interest I had noticed about him was the double crown atop his head. A double crown, according to Grandmother, meant two separate spirits inhabited a person’s body. Hogwash, of course. (Does Grandmother still believe her dachshund puppy is the reincarnation of Uncle Seymour because of a shared fondness for rum-and-raisin ice cream?)

Under his desk, Johnny held a sketch pad and a pencil. As the winds roared and Andrea, Patsy, and several others girls shrieked and sniveled and Mr. Proman walked the rows of desks growling, “Silence!” Johnny Henzel whispered to me, “Can I draw you?”

I consented. If a tornado did demolish the school and kill me, the sketch might survive and serve as a record of my final moments and a memento for you to cherish, Mother and Father. (Perhaps you have a similar memento today, such as that photograph of me aboard the Spirit of Alaska.) It felt odd to pose stock-still for a sketch, however. In fact, no classmate of mine had ever looked at me with such genuine interest as Johnny did that day. As his pencil scraped across the page, I felt the unease—albeit a milder version—that I feel when somebody touches me, so after a while I asked if I might close my eyes.

“I’m done with the eyes,” he replied.

I wondered if he would sketch an unflattering caricature. Maybe he would draw me as the ghostlike apparition crossing the bridge in Edvard Munch’s The Scream (that hysterical fellow and I share a pointy chin). But after forty minutes were up and the principal came on the public address system to announce that the tornado had swept out of the county, Johnny showed me his drawing and it was no caricature. It was, in fact, a good likeness of me, a boy crouching under a desk and waiting patiently for his life either to end or to carry on. I stared at myself, at my wispy hair, my triangular face, and the dark circles under my eyes. “You have talent, Johnny Henzel,” I said.

He shrugged and closed his sketch pad. I thought he would offer me the drawing, but he did not. I never saw it again.

Now, two years later, Johnny Henzel again sits on a floor with a sketch pad and pencils, which I picked up at his request from a nearby warehouse using the coupons we townies receive to buy supplies. This time, however, the floor is the roof of the Frank and Joe, and the sky is not tornado-green but rather the usual gray covered in a sheet of clouds. Johnny, the temperamental artist, described it earlier as a sea of fire-extinguisher foam.

As he draws, he talks about secret tunnels to America, the so-called portals that supposedly lead us back home. He heard about them from portal seeker Harry O’Grady, the boy who lives across the hall from us. “You should be out looking for portals, Boo. That’s a science experiment worth doing.”

“I’m not sure it’s a science, Johnny. I think it’s more like wishful thinking.”

I examine the glass window in the shed atop our building. The glass has completely grown back. The entire gestation period of the window’s birth was thirty-one days—about the length of an earthly month. I want to test again to see if I obtain the same result twice, so I take my hammer and strike it against the glass till the window again shatters. Johnny glances up briefly at the noise, and I go into the shed and use a whisk broom and dustpan to sweep up the shards.

When I come out, I remind Johnny of the sketch he did of me during the tornado drill and ask him whatever became of it.

He shrugs.

I tell Johnny that Mr. Plumb, our principal at Helen Keller, should have placed his sketch of me in the school lobby instead of my yearbook picture. I looked more like me in his sketch than I did in my photo. This is a compliment, but Johnny does not reply. His eyes focus on his page. His brow furrows. He licks the tip of his pencil.

My roommate has not showered in days and smells like fried onions. I mention this, and he replies, “Don’t stand too close, then.”

“Did you not realize,” I say, “that the name Oliver is an Irish Gaelic noun meaning ‘he who does not stand too close’?”

He ignores my lighthearted banter because he is concentrating on his drawing. This time, of course, he is not drawing me. In a few days, we are to have a meeting with the do-good council from Eleven, and he will bring along what he calls a “wanted-dead-or-alive poster.”

Last night, Johnny had another nightmare about our killer. He woke up yelling at around three o’clock, a scream so earsplitting it seemed to pierce every wall, brick, and floorboard at the Frank and Joe. I scrambled out of bed, clicked on the light, and tried shaking him awake, my heart thumping so fast I expected its hole to whistle. Johnny stared up at me, eyes bulging, mouth agape, screams still coming. I had never slapped a person in my life, but I slapped Johnny—so hard I left an imprint of my palm on his face.

He did not want to talk much about his nightmare then, or this morning. I try again. “What happened in your dream, Johnny?” I say nonchalantly as I examine my glass shards, which are all the same size, a half inch in diameter.

Johnny stops drawing. He looks up at the mackerel sky (the holy mackerel sky, ha-ha) and then back down at me. “You really want to know?” he says.

I nod.

“Well, Gunboy was chasing me in Woodfield Mall. He was taking potshots at me but kept missing. He cornered me in that store by the food court that sells beanbag chairs. Then he gave me an ultimatum. He’d let me go if I could explain why I loved life.”

“How did you do that?”

“I told him about Rover, what I love about my dog. His bloodshot eyes and fishy breath, his big sighs and meaty paws. How he was proud to be a paper-dog delivering the Tribune. And how he read the comics and wanted his own strip like Marmaduke.”

“Did Gunboy let you go?” I ask.

“If he’d let me go, you think I’d be screaming my f*cking head off?”

“I suppose not.”

“No, Gunboy said my story was crap and he was doing me a favor blasting it out of my brain.”

Curious, I ask to see his dead-or-alive poster.

He hands me his sketch pad. “Ring a bell?”

I do not recognize the face from my four days in eighth grade. If the boy had just started at Helen Keller on the Tuesday of that first week, I probably did not notice him. Maybe he was even in seventh grade. Or, more likely, the boy who Johnny sees in his nightmares is not the boy who shot us at all. This Gunboy he sees may be purely a figment of his own imagination.

In Johnny’s sketch, Gunboy’s face has misaligned features, as though his head were sliced down the middle and glued back together, but not quite evenly. One eye higher than the other. A crooked nose. Big ears out of kilter. Wild, tousled hair.

“He has empty eyes like David Berkowitz.”

“Who?” I ask.

“Son of Sam, Boo. You have heard of Son of Sam, right?”

“The madman who shot people in New York.”

“Thirteen people.”

You turned off the news, Mother and Father, whenever stories of violence aired. “Our ears are too sensitive,” you often said, Mother. So I never learned much about Sam and his son. In any case, news stories were of interest to me only when they revolved around science—fresh observations about the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan, for example.

Johnny, however, read about David Berkowitz in the newspaper. “The guy was a lunatic. He said a neighbor’s bloodhound was possessed by a god who told him to shoot people. A f*cking nutcase, man. He should have gotten the death penalty.”

Johnny stares at his sketch. “Gunboy’s like the Grandson of Sam.”

“If Gunboy is here,” I say, “Zig was sleeping on the job.”

Johnny scrambles to his feet. “F*cking Zig!” he yells at the clouds. He bounces on his toes and swings his fists at the air. “Don’t you know what the hell you’re doing, you son of a b*tch?”

I try to lighten the mood. “Maybe our Zig was the actual god inside Mr. Berkowitz’s bloodhound.”

“Huh?”

I adopt the voice of a cartoon dog with a lisp. “Excuthe me, thon of Tham, I’m Thig and I order you to athathinate the people of New York Thity.”

I am not normally this playful. Maybe Zig has altered my personality to better suit my surroundings.

Johnny stops shaking his fists at the clouds. He glances at me with a startled look. Then he bursts out laughing.

“What ith tho funny?”

He laughs so hard his eyes tear up. He wipes them with his fingers. This is the first time Johnny Henzel has laughed since his passing. I feel prouder than the time I increased the pH of my urine by consuming citrus fruits.

Consequently, a smile is cracked.