That night, we stay in the Jim Hawkins Dormitory. The dormitories in Town always have a few empty rooms available to accommodate visitors. We are in Ten, a zone that looks no different from Eleven. It has the same buildings, which resemble junior highs from cities and towns across America.

Our little group dropped by the infirmaries in both zones earlier this afternoon, but their records showed no births on or around September 7, 1979, the date of my passing.

I enjoyed visiting the infirmaries because I could chat with the nurses on duty about healing times of broken and fractured limbs and collarbones. At the Mary Lennox Infirmary, we were permitted to explore the rebirthing room for a few minutes. I was struck again by how plain—and, frankly, non-magical—a rebirthing bed looked. Johnny and I pulled back the covers, peeked under the mattress, and slid underneath the bed, but we found nothing out of the ordinary.

By nine thirty, the four of us are exhausted from cycling and walking all day, and are in Esther and Thelma’s guest room wearing our pajamas, which we have carried with us in our knapsacks. Thelma is applying a bandage to a blister on Esther’s foot. She tells us she plans to courier a letter to the gommers to say we will attend their meeting scheduled a few days from now in Six. Meanwhile, I am writing about our adventures in my ledger at the desk, and Johnny is flipping through a map of heaven that the do-good council gave us. Because heaven has no printing presses, all maps are hand-drawn. The maps are in a spiral binder, each page devoted to one zone. They are approximate since heaven has no helicopters to fly over the terrarium to take the true lay of the land.

Thelma tells Johnny he would make a fine mapmaker because he likes to draw. She is always trying to find Johnny and me an occupation. As newbies, we are not required to work for our first six months in heaven, but after that, we need to settle on some part-time job. Cook, librarian, teacher, nurse, tailor, barber, launderer, courier, bike mechanic, and window washer are a few of the positions available. Townies tend to rotate in and out of different jobs.

“I wanna be a portal seeker,” Johnny says. “I wanna find a tunnel back to America and go on a haunting.”

According to portal seekers, a townie can return to his hometown and “haunt” his loved ones.

“Don’t be gullible, Johnny,” Esther says. “There’s no such thing as a portal.”

“You don’t know that,” Thelma replies. “Maybe we ain’t found one yet, but they could exist.”

“I hear some kids have found portals but don’t want to tell the rest of us,” Johnny says. “They want to keep their finds a secret so only they can go on hauntings.”

Esther says one idiotic portal seeker tried throwing himself down his dorm’s garbage chute. He was convinced that our trash tumbled back to America.

“Garbage chutes are too narrow to climb into,” I say. “That’s an old wives’ tale.”

Thelma corrects me: “An old girls’ tale is what we say here.”

“Last week, I saw a kid climb into a clothes dryer and inspect the lint drawer for a portal,” Esther says. “I wanted to slam the door shut and turn the machine on, but I didn’t because I’m a do-gooder in training.”

“Yes, honey, you’re pure goodness,” Thelma says, patting Esther’s bandaged foot.

“If I found a portal,” Johnny says, “I’d visit Rover and take him on long walks. My sister must be taking care of him. She loves animals. We were supposed to open a pet shop together. We were going to call it Zoo. When I was in my coma, Brenda kept saying, ‘Don’t die, Johnny. We got to open Zoo.’ ”

If she went on a haunting, Thelma says she would visit her three siblings, Antoine, Ralph, and Shawna. “They’re in their twenties and thirties now. They might have kids of their own. I could babysit them. A ghost babysitter who’d tell them ghost stories. The kids would love me.”

“I’d haunt my old church,” Esther says. “I’d fly over the pulpit and tell all those pious suckers that Osmond Family albums are the devil’s work.”

As a ghost, Johnny says, he would also haunt any members of the Manson family still not in jail. He would scare them into becoming honorable citizens—crossing guards, accountants, librarians, school nurses. Thelma and Esther nod, since news of the Manson family’s grisly activities has spread to Town through the mouths of newbies.

Johnny decides to draw Thelma and Esther posed as ghosts. He drapes them in bedsheets, their faces peeking out, but because the sheets have a blue trim, the girls look less like ghosts and more like Mother Teresa. The girls sit side by side on one bed, and Johnny sits on the other, drawing them on the sketch pad he brought along in his knapsack.

While he works, Thelma sings us Cole Porter songs. When she starts in on “Miss Otis Regrets,” she stops after the first verse and says she forgot the lyrics. She switches to “Too Darn Hot.” Thelma is telling a white lie: she did not forget the lyrics. As you know, Father and Mother, in the second verse of “Miss Otis Regrets,” Miss Otis draws a gun and shoots her lover down. Thelma does not want Johnny to hear a macabre story about a shooting, because she is a real do-gooder and a real friend to Johnny. And to me, too, I suppose.

By the time Johnny finishes his sketch, all four of us are yawning. We go off to the bathrooms in the corridor to prepare for bed.

In the boys’ room, Johnny brushes his teeth after sprinkling his toothbrush with baking soda, which is kept in a box on the edge of the sink. This is a good sign that he is perking up; he does not always clean his teeth without my urging. While he brushes, I strip down and slip into a shower stall. I always wash thoroughly before bed, especially given the cycling we did today. It is important to wash sweat and sebum from the body: even though things like cancer are absent from heaven, acne pimples, jock itch, and offensive odors are not.

When I come out of the shower, I take my towel from my knapsack and wrap it around my waist. I do not see Johnny and assume he went back to our room, but no, he is crawling on his hands and knees under the line of sinks. He is examining the piping and maybe wondering where our water supply comes from (I often wonder that myself).

“I’m checking for portals,” he says, trying to pry loose tiles from the wall under the sink using the arm of a nail clipper.

“If there were a portal here, somebody would have found it by now.”

“You don’t believe in portals, do you?”

“Believing in portals is like believing in telekinesis. Until you bend a spoon with your mind, I can’t believe.”

As I put my pajamas back on, Johnny says, “You didn’t say what you’d do on a haunting, Boo. Would you go see your folks?”

I rub my towel over my hair. I feel the lump at the base of my skull, which you, Mother, call my mathematics bump. You claim it helped me learn my times tables at age five.

I tell Johnny that if I went on a haunting, I would deliver to you the book I am writing about my afterlife. However, I would not hang around long, because that would be cruel, would it not? It might give you hope, Mother and Father, that I would come back to life for good. But I would only be a ghost, not a real boy. I would never grow up. I would never go to MIT as Father wished; I would never work for NASA as Mother wanted.

I explain all this to Johnny, but he does not reply. He stays underneath the sink picking at the tiles. I go back to our room, hang my clothes in the creaky wardrobe, and climb into bed. Through the wall, I hear Thelma’s whoop of laughter.

I often cannot fall asleep when I am overtired, but not tonight. I nod off in the blink of an eye (eyes, actually) with the desk lamp still on. This is a minor miracle.

Another minor miracle occurs a moment later.

Johnny comes flying into our room, yelling, “Boo, Boo!” He yanks the blanket off me and pulls me out of bed by my pajama top, popping a button. “Follow me!” he cries.

“You found a portal?” I mumble.

“No, but something almost as good.”

I follow him back to the bathroom. He hurries to the last sink and points into the basin.

“Look,” he whispers. “A curious object.”

“Zig almighty!”

Sitting beside the drain is an insect at least two inches long. It has dark amber wings folded over its body and a black splotch on its pronotum (the plate covering its head and upper thorax).

“Is it a kind of roach?” Johnny says, leaning in close to the basin.

I nod. “Zig must have a weird sense of humor. You know what this kind of cockroach is called?”

Johnny shrugs.

“Death’s head.” I point to its pronotum. “That black splotch is said to look like a death mask or a vampire’s scowl.”

Johnny’s face lights up as it has never done before in the hereafter. He lays a hand, palm up, in the sink, and the death’s head (Blaberus craniifer) marches over his fingers and sits on his lifeline.