YOU DON’T HAVE TO FORGIVE, reads a poster hung in the room where the gommers are meeting at the Ponyboy Curtis School. The lettering is done in red glitter sprinkled over glue. A second poster, also sparkly, is placed below the first. It reads, BUT YOU CAN IF YOU WANT.

I half listen to Thelma explain the Gunboy story as I sit on a shabby sofa with stuffing coming out of the arms. Beside me sits Esther. Gathered around us are twenty-two gommers, some of whom may have forgiven their murderers and some of whom may have not.

Have I forgiven Gunboy? I am not sure. To me, he is as mysterious as Zig. Both are invisible to me. Zig works behind the scenes. Gunboy also did his work behind the scenes (or at least behind my back), so I find it hard to summon hatred or harbor ill will toward my killer. If Gunboy had shot you, Mother and Father, I could be merciless. I could pick up a brick, as Johnny suggested, and strike Gunboy’s head again and again till his deranged mind spilled from his skull. But for my own passing, hatred is harder to drum up because here I am in a new world that is fascinating.

And, as I said earlier, what if Zig did indeed reform Gunboy? Then my grasp on the brick would be shakier.

I wish Johnny were here to tell our story himself, but he did not turn up at the Jack Merridew Dormitory, where we are to pass the night in Six, even though he has our itinerary with him. I left him a note in the room we are supposed to share in case he shows up later. It reads, “Dear Johnny, when we find Gunboy, I promise to put up my dukes. Please come to the gommer meeting (see the map I drew on the back). Your friend, Oliver (a.k.a. Boo). P.S. I left you an orange in case you are hungry.”

My roommate dislikes schools, so he probably will not come. For him, walking into all these schools in heaven is akin to a boy who died in an airplane crash boarding jumbo jets forevermore in his afterlife.

As usual, Thelma is wearing her purple armband this evening as a sign of her do-goodism. She gestures a lot as she speaks, making wavy hand movements like a Trojan cheerleader. “So Oliver and Johnny are in a darn pickle,” she says. “Their killer may be in Town. If so, we townies have to decide what to do. As a gommer myself, I think we could use your advice.”

The gommers, seated on sofas, armchairs, and throw cushions spread across the wood-slat floor, barely moved a muscle or batted an eye as Thelma told our story. They still seem spellbound. Some have their mouths hanging open. They remind me, in their patient excitement, of Rover the basset hound as he waited outside while his master delivered the Tribune at Sandpits.

A skinny girl with stringy hair speaks first. “Hunt Gunboy down,” she says matter-of-factly, “and drown him in a lake.”

For a moment nobody speaks. Then a boy says, “Stab him in the gut.”

A slew of different ends for Gunboy is suggested, including “Toss him off a bridge,” “Poison him with arsenic,” and “Push him in front of a subway train.”

Given the lack of lakes, bridges, arsenic, and subway trains in Town, I gather that the gommers are suggesting redeath penalties in line with their own murders. I look at Thelma seated beside me, expecting her to balk, but she does not. She just rubs her palms up and down her thighs as though wiping away sweat.

I glance at the glittery forgive/don’t forgive posters. I am about to respond with irony, to say, “Hey, you can forgive if you want,” but Esther speaks first.

“What if Johnny fingers the wrong kid?”

The gommer group leader, the girl who presumably was pushed in front of a subway train, asks, “Why would he blame some innocent boy?”

Esther clenches a sofa cushion in her lap, and I fear she will swat a gommer with it. “He never even saw his killer!” she shouts. “He sees this kid only in his frigging nightmares!”

The boy who was probably stabbed insists a gommer’s nightmares are always very telling. “They’re proof as far as I’m concerned,” he says.

The bridge boy cries, “Hear, hear!” which is echoed by other gommers.

Esther ignores them and turns to me. “Maybe Johnny’s a little crazy, Boo,” she says, “and doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.”

The subway girl jumps in: “The murdered are always a little crazy when they first come here. You can’t understand. You aren’t one of us.”

Esther says with an exasperated sigh, “Oh, get over it already.”

Now all the gommers glare at her. Their faces look creepy and almost evil, as though they have just transformed into their own killers.

Thelma says, “Esther, don’t be rude.”

Esther huffs and then announces, “I’m going for a pee.” She gets up from the sofa and asks me, “Don’t you have to pee too?”

Thelma always encourages us to use the facilities before we hit the road, so I nod even though I have no urge to urinate. Esther and I step around the gommers, who continue to give her defiant stares. When we are in the hallway, she tells me to follow her. She heads into the boys’ room (because she is a feminist and deems separate rooms for boys and girls a form of segregation), then goes into a stall and closes the door. While she urinates, I wait at the sinks and wash my hands with a cake of glycerin soap.

“I’m serious about Johnny being a bit crazy,” Esther says from the stall. “Was he always so weird?”

Weird? How strange that Esther considers Johnny the weird one. If eighth graders from Helen Keller were asked which boy, Johnny Henzel or Oliver Dalrymple, was weirder, I would win the vote by a landslide. Any students choosing Johnny would have to be odd themselves—for example, a girl like Jenny Vasquez, who keeps in her pocketbook a zoo of plastic farm animals, which she often converses with.

I tell Esther I do not recall too much overt weirdness from Johnny, but then again, he and I had little contact. I can confirm he was not prone to fistfights, rude behavior, or spitball shenanigans at school.

Esther comes out of the stall and washes her hands. She is just tall enough to see herself in the mirror hung over the sink.

“We’d better find Johnny soon before he wreaks havoc,” she says.

“He won’t wreak havoc,” I assure her.

She takes a paper towel from a stack on the sink, dries her hands, and then crumples the towel and throws it at me. “How can I trust your instincts?” she says. “You’re biased because he’s your friend.”

I pick up the balled-up towel from the floor and drop it in the wastebasket. “As a junior scientist and researcher, I promise you I always remain unbiased.”

She raises her eyebrows.

“Neutral and objective.”

“He’s bloodthirsty, your friend.”

“He’s just a bit nervous.”

“There’s never been a murder here, Boo. If Johnny or the gommers kill Gunboy, who knows what’ll happen. Who knows how Zig will react.”

“You think he’ll punish us?” This thought had not occurred to me.

“I’m not saying the ground will crack open and swallow us whole, but for sure there’ll be a reckoning.”

I wonder about this, because if Zig is also overseeing America, he does not seem to pencil in days of reckoning—despite the injustice, violence, and death penalties there.

“Boo, it’s up to us to stop Johnny,” Esther says. “If we don’t, we’ll have blood on our hands.”