Johnny names the cockroach Rover in honor of his beloved basset hound. How did Rover the roach end up in heaven? Johnny concludes that the death’s head did not pass in the sense of die but did pass through a portal connecting life in America with life in the afterlife. The bathroom sink may be a portal, he says, nodding confidently. I am less certain. I need more evidence before drawing such a conclusion.

We are in Thelma and Esther’s room, where Johnny has placed Rover in a large margarine container he found in the dorm’s kitchenette. He added an apple core, pieces of orange skins, and a potato peel as food.

Thelma tells us that though a gerbil, a kitten, and a budgie have all made their way to heaven, this to her knowledge is the first insect. “Peter Peter is gonna be knocked for a loop!” she says.

Johnny puts his ear close to the margarine container. “I can hear him. It’s like he’s whispering something to me.”

“It must be its wings rubbing together,” I say, although I do not hear anything.

“Rover will bring us good luck,” Johnny tells us. “He’ll help us hunt down Gunboy.”

Esther does not like insects. She squealed when we first showed her the death’s head. “If you ask me,” she says, “that gross sh*t fly of yours is a jinx.”

Despite her warning, luck smiles on us in the first few days after the death’s head joins our group. The sun shines brightly during this time. The skin of my companions turns browner, whereas mine, lacking melanin, remains ghostly pale (sunburns, by the way, do not exist in Town).

We make good progress during these days and visit four more zones (Nine, Two, Eight, and Seven). On the third day, in the rebirthing book at the Paul Atreides Infirmary in Seven, we come across the name of a newbie from Chicago who passed the day after me. Nina Mitchell. When we visit her at her dorm, she says she recalls little from the news reports other than “Some kids got killed at a school.” When Johnny implores her to think harder, she makes a valid point: “I’d remember more if a double-decker bus hadn’t run me over the next day.”

“Don’t get discouraged, son,” Thelma tells Johnny when we are leaving Nina’s dorm. “We’re making headway.” She reminds us about the gommer meeting we will attend tonight. “We should’ve gotten the gommers involved from the get-go,” Thelma says. “If anybody can help us find a murderer, it’s murder survivors.”

We pedal all afternoon toward Six, but go at a leisurely pace because Esther’s legs are too short to cycle fast on her bike, which Johnny calls her “pinkmobile.” Johnny in fact prefers to go slowly because then he can easily check the faces of oncoming cyclists. Three times already on our road trip, he thought he spotted Gunboy, but when he raced after the big-eared boy, he discovered that the cyclist was simply a look-alike.

We arrive at the infirmary in Six, which is called the Deborah Blau Infirmary. The building has cracked white pillars out front, which, Johnny says, make sense because they look like broken femurs, and the infirmary is where a townie with a broken leg would go. But as she gets off her bicycle, Thelma contradicts Johnny: “The Deborah is different. It’s not for broken bones. It’s for broken souls.”

“Broken souls?” I ask as I tie my ribbon to my bike.

“Mental cases,” Esther says. “The Deborah is for kids with mental problems.”

“An asylum?” I ask.

“Not exactly,” Thelma says. “These kids don’t have multiple personalities or think they’re superheroes. They’re just a little sad and confused. We even call them ‘sadcons.’ ”

“I’m a little sad and confused,” Esther says. “But do you see me checking in at this place for some R and R?”

“You’re not sad and confused,” Thelma says.

“Sometimes I am,” Esther insists. “But I don’t mope around in my jammies all day like a sadcon.”

“What do you do when you’re sad and confused, Esther?” I ask.

“I go on road trips with you mental cases.”

Johnny is fishing his margarine tub out of his knapsack so Rover can also visit the Deborah. Without looking at us, he says, “I used to see a shrink.”

After a pause during which Thelma, Esther, and I throw one another surprised glances, Thelma asks, “What kind of shrink, honey?”

Johnny scratches his double crown. “I can’t remember exactly. His name was Harold. He had hairy nostrils and ears, which were really gross, but still he was a nice guy.”

“What did you talk to him about?” Esther asks.

“I don’t remember much. But I used to show him my artwork. He was really into it, especially the abstract stuff.”

“But why did your folks send you to him?” Esther asks.

Johnny gives a jerky shrug. “I guess I was a sadcon.” He heads up the lopsided steps of the infirmary, holding the margarine tub in front of him like a casserole he is bringing to a patient. He has punctured holes in the side and top of the tub so the death’s head can peer out.

You never sent me to a psychologist, Mother and Father, but I was often asked to speak to Mr. Buckley, a school counselor who was worried I did not fit in. It was on his advice that I practiced friendship speeches in front of my mirror at home (“Hello, Jermaine Tucker. Did you watch the Cubs game yesterday? Whom did they play against?”). Mr. Buckley said I was a round peg and all the holes at Helen Keller were square, and he grew exasperated when I explained how to bisect a round peg and cut a square shape from it. “Enough with the geometry!” he yelled, and I shut up because I dislike being yelled at. I am thankful you never hollered at me, Father and Mother.

When I saw Johnny around Sandpits or at school, he did not look sad and confused. To me, he looked like all the other boys at our school—confident, peppy, dreamy-eyed. Then again, I avoided looking too closely at my classmates.

We enter the Deborah and go to the reception desk. While Thelma explains our case to the clerk, I steal glances into the common room, where sadcons in their pajamas (as Esther predicted) are chatting or reading comic books. One boy is wearing a hat made out of twisted party balloons. These sadcons do not look different from the townies gathered in the ground-floor common room of the Frank and Joe, many of whom also don crazy hats they make themselves.

We head down the hallway to check the rebirthing book in the main office.

“Are only sad and confused thirteen-year-olds born at this infirmary?” I ask Thelma.

“No, any kind of person can be born here,” she tells me. “Townies who check into the Deborah might have had serious mental problems back in America. Maybe even schizophrenia.”

“The word ‘schizophrenia’ means ‘split mind,’ ” I say.

“Some of them claim they were schizo back in America,” Esther says, “but I bet they’re exaggerating just to get out of working.”

“Gunboy was crazy,” Johnny says. “Maybe he checked in here.”

We stop dead in our tracks. Esther says, “Good point.”

Thelma gives us permission to wander the floors of the patient areas while she checks the rebirthing book. “But promise me, Johnny, that if you think you spot Gunboy, you won’t lose your cool.”

“I’ll be as cool as a cucumber,” Johnny says, smiling slyly.

I do not believe him.

“Cool as a jalapeño pepper is more like it,” Esther says. To Thelma she promises, “We’ll keep an eye on him.”

Thelma reminds us that we must contact the local do-good council if we come across our killer. “It ain’t up to you to dish out punishment.”

“I’ll be good,” Johnny says. “Cross my heart and hope to redie.”

As we walk down the halls of the Deborah, we peek into rooms where sadcons are reading in bed, staring out their window, or snoozing with earplugs stuffed in their ear canals. We wander around an inner courtyard filled with rosebushes. We walk through the cafeteria (today’s special: rigatoni) and also through an arts and crafts class where a dozen people are making sock puppets. (Esther says that instead of sock puppets the sadcons just need “a good sock in the head.” Sometimes I wonder how she managed to pass her do-gooder training courses.)

Along the way, Johnny pulls his dead-or-alive poster from his backpack to show around. “Seen this kid anywhere?” Nobody has. One sadcon we come across crouched in a stairwell says, “He looks like me.” Nonsense. She is a redheaded girl mottled with freckles.

Johnny also approaches the do-good staff, again with no luck. Maybe only the most caring and kind do-gooders are posted at an asylum. They probably listen carefully to a sadcon’s problems and lend helpful and heartening advice. I would not be able to hold down such a job because I have no wise advice to offer other than, “Sadness and confusion can be fleeting. Wait awhile and maybe they’ll wane.”

We trail up and down the hallways of the first two floors to no avail. After we are denied entry to the third floor (because the most serious mental cases reside there), Johnny decides to take Rover to the roof for some exercise. I follow him while Esther goes off to find Thelma.

The Deborah’s rooftop affords a wide view of Six, the schools, the parks, the warehouses. We slip off our knapsacks and sit on the little concrete wall surrounding the roof edge. Johnny peels off the lid of the margarine tub (which he has taken to calling the roach’s “camper”), and the death’s head climbs out and scurries along the wall.

“We’re getting warmer,” Johnny says.

“I estimate eighty degrees,” I reply, squinting at the yellow blur of the sun hidden behind a cloud. “But then again, it’s always about eighty degrees in the afternoon in Town. I think I’ll miss seasons. Back in Hoffman Estates, the leaves will be falling from the trees now.”

“I’m not talking about seasons, Boo. I’m talking about Gunboy.”

I stare at my roommate. His irises are the color of old Lincoln pennies. “How do you know we’re getting close?”

“I feel it in my bones.” He rubs his bony knees. “Maybe I’m some kind of divining rod that feels things others can’t. Maybe I’m different from other kids.”

Because he looks so serious, I ask if he had this sixth sense back in America.

“Possibly. That’s maybe why I was sad and confused.” After a pause, he adds, “Do you remember everything about your old life, Boo?”

“I suppose so—unless Zig erased things I don’t realize he erased,” I say. “In general, I have a photographic memory. I even recall word for word the pages from our math textbook. Page seventy-two explained the Pythagorean theorem and how to find the length of the hypotenuse.”

“My memory’s a bit shot,” Johnny says with an anxious look. “But then, I got shot in the head, so some of my brain might be missing. Some of my past as well. Like the summer before I came here. I don’t remember much of that. Just snippets here and there.”

We embarked on this road trip on the basis of Johnny’s memory. Perhaps that was not very wise if his memory is shaky.

Rover returns from its jaunt and climbs onto Johnny’s shoulder. “Polly wanna cracker?” he asks as if the roach were a parrot. Then a grin spreads across his face. “He’s whispering again,” Johnny says.

I stare at the roach on his shoulder to see if it is rubbing its wings or limbs together. It seems to be doing neither. “What do you mean it is talking?” I say.

“I can hear his little voice mumbling.”

“It is not talking, Johnny.”

“I hear something.”

“You must have the ears of Rover the basset hound.”

“My word, is that an insect?” a voice says.

Johnny and I turn our heads and see a girl in pajamas coming up behind us. She is the freckly sadcon from the stairwell, who believed herself to be Gunboy’s spitting image. Johnny pulls Rover off his shoulder and cups the roach in his hands to show the girl. I explain that the insect is a species of cockroach known as a death’s head.

“Death’s head!” the girl says, her eyes round as she stares at Rover. “Well, that’s the biggest sign Zig ever sent me.”

The girl sits between us on the wall circling the roof. She has hazel irises—green, yellow, spots of brown—the deep, busy eyes that remind me of gas planets in a far-off galaxy.

“Zig sends you signs?” Johnny asks.

“He sends us all signs, but not everybody knows how to read them.”

“What’s my roach a sign of?”

The girl gives Johnny a sly half smile. “A portal,” she says.

“Rover came out of a portal!” Johnny’s eyes light up. “The drain of a sink that leads all the way back to America.”

“A sink’s no portal!” she exclaims. “Are you crazy?”

“So where’s there a portal then?” Johnny asks, still cupping the death’s head.

The girl ignores him. She strokes the insect with a fingertip. “You got wings,” the girl says to Rover. “So you’re a real angel, not frauds like the rest of us suckers.”

“Despite its wings, the death’s head cockroach cannot fly or even glide,” I say, “unlike the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana.”

The girl blinks at me. She has an orangey stain on the front of her pajama top, perhaps pasta sauce from lunch. The cuffs of her pajama bottoms are gray with dirt.

“Are you sad and confused?” I ask the girl. Johnny shakes his head to deter me.

“Huh?”

“Sad and confused.”

She looks skyward. “Zig above, let me grow wings. Let me soar,” she calls out, her brow knitted.

“I wonder why people suppose their gods are circling high above in the clouds,” I say. “Couldn’t they just as easily be hiding in the molecules of, say, a rock or a tree or even a roach?”

The girl’s toenails, I notice, are painted purple with what looks to be pastel crayons. The death’s head crawls out of Johnny’s hands and onto her lap. “What a pretty baby,” she murmurs, bowing her head to study the death-mask blotch on the roach’s pronotum. A spot near her crown is almost bald. Either she has had a hack-job haircut or she has been plucking individual hairs from that spot.

The girl suddenly looks up, astonished. “Your roach here can talk,” she says.

Johnny says, “You hear him too.”

“I can’t hear what he’s saying, but he’s saying something.”

“Certain roach species can make a hissing noise,” I say. “Perhaps that is what you are hearing.”

A whistle sounds, Esther’s trademark trill like the call of a red-winged blackbird. I glance down and see Esther and Thelma waiting in the parking lot beside our bicycles. Thelma waves. “Time to go, Johnny,” I say, nodding toward the girls.

Johnny lifts Rover gently from the girl’s thigh and drops it into its camper. He snaps the lid on.

“See you around,” Johnny says to the girl.

She mumbles, “Don’t count on it.”

Johnny and I head toward the stairs. As we pull open the door to the exit, the sadcon girl shouts, “May Zig be with you!”

As we walk down the stairs, Johnny says, “That chick looks nothing at all like Gunboy.”

When we reach the ground floor, he turns to me. “Holy sh*t!” he shouts, his face crumbling. He races back up the stairs.

Should I follow? His running shoes slap against the steps as he climbs higher. I assume he forgot something on the roof—his sketch pad, his pencils—though why so panicky?

I cut across the lobby (a stenciled poster reads, MY SADCON PROB IS NO CON JOB) and then leave the building through a side door and cross a stretch of lawn to the parking lot. Thelma and Esther are already astride their bicycles. I wave, but they do not see me. They are looking up. Thelma yelps and throws her ten-speed to the ground. She runs toward the Deborah.

I glance up just as the redhead girl plummets headfirst off the roof. She makes no sound as she falls. Her arms and legs do not flail. Her body does not right itself. She falls as if she is already dead. I gasp and flinch, expecting a horrible thud and the crack of her skull hitting the ground. But no thud comes. No crack either. Instead, her body passes through the solid earth as though she just dived into a calm lake.

Thelma reaches the spot where the girl disappeared. She drops to her knees. I sprint over. Thelma is panting and repeating shrilly, “Lordy! Lordy! Lordy!” Balled-up pajamas with an orange stain lie in a flowerbed of wilting black-eyed Susans. Thelma paws at the earth as though she might dig through the dirt and bring the girl back. Esther trots toward us in her ungainly run. I look up to see Johnny leaning over the edge of the roof. I fear that he, too, will leap. Never in my life have I screamed, but I do so now: “No!”