The janitor’s office is furnished sparsely, with the ratty couch and five wobbly school chairs fitted with desktops the size of a painter’s palette. In one corner stands a stack of cardboard boxes filled with a hodgepodge of forgotten supplies. In these Johnny and I found the baseball cap, sunglasses, box cutter, and Hardy Boys novel. I was in fact looking for clothing because I no longer had a change of clothes with me and Johnny did not have many clothes with him either. On my second night here, after the Marcy closed, I went upstairs to the boys’ locker room and looked for clothing left behind in the lockers. The pickings were slim for a boy as slim as I (ha-ha). I am swimming in the cutoff shorts and shirt I found. No matter. I will make do.

Few people ever come down to the basement of the Marcy. When they do, they usually just use the restroom at the foot of the stairs, and they do not wander into the other rooms farther down the hall. There is little reason to, since the rooms are stocked with castoffs.

On the evening when Johnny first abandoned us, he discovered the janitor’s office while exploring the center after it closed. He broke into the Marcy by shimmying through an unlocked basement window. His aim, he said, was to find a place where nobody could attack him in his sleep. By “nobody,” he meant Gunboy.

When I return from the cafeteria with our supper, I slip through the same window and drop to the floor. I go down the hall to the janitor’s office, where Johnny is in the gym clothes I found for him in the locker room. He is doing military push-ups on the concrete floor. He claps his hands between push-ups. His T-shirt is sweaty, and his onion smell stinks up the room.

I tell him his efforts are for naught. “Our bodies do not change. The muscle and fat we come here with are the muscle and fat we have forevermore.”

“That’s not fair,” he says, winded.

“Afterlife ain’t fair,” I reply. This is something Esther always says.

I set out our supper on the floor, using paper towels as place mats. I even arrange a place setting for Rover because Johnny likes to drop a spoonful of food on a coaster for his pet roach to nibble on.

“His voice is growing stronger,” he tells me as he feeds Rover. “I hear words every now and again. Today I heard the word ‘suicide.’ ”

“Suicide?”

“It sounded like a girl’s voice. I bet it’s Willa talking about leaping off the Deborah.”

I have never heard a peep from that creature.

I worry about Johnny’s mental state.

He notices the scabs on my arms and legs. “Did you get in a fight with a pocketknife?”

“A box cutter,” I say. “It is a scab-healing experiment.”

He shakes his head; now it is he who is worried about my mental state. Then he asks for an update on Gunboy. I tell him Czar is stable and little has changed since yesterday. Johnny guesses that Gunboy will live for another month before succumbing to his injuries. “After all,” he says, “I passed after five weeks in a coma.”

“You two are treading the same path?”

Johnny runs a finger along the wings of his death’s head as the roach feeds. “We have lots in common, Gunboy and me,” he says.

“What exactly?”

“Hot tempers. We’re both angry b*stards.”

I think back to Helen Keller and Sandpits. I do not remember Johnny being hot-tempered. I picture him seated peacefully in a corner of the library as he drew in his sketch pad. I recall him running serenely on the outdoor track that circled the football field. Everybody liked Johnny. From what I recall, our classmates did not seem to mock or bully him or try to pummel him to death in murderball as they did with me.

After Johnny and I finish supper, I rinse our plastic containers and utensils in the sink and wipe them dry with the lobster towel. Then I turn to Johnny, who is playing jacks on the floor with an old set he found in a box of junk.

I do not say, “I have something important to tell you” (he will realize it is important). I do not say, “You had better sit down” (he is already sitting) or “Hold on to your hat” (he has on a baseball cap). I just say, “Czar is forty-six years old.”

Johnny misses the ball while trying to grab five jacks at once. He glances up. “What do you mean, forty-six?”

“He is an old boy. He came here decades ago.”

He frowns and spits out, “Don’t f*ck with me.”

“Why would I f*ck with you? I make it a lifelong habit never to f*ck with anybody at any time.”

I sit with him and his jacks. I explain about a group of visitors who came to see Czar just before I left the infirmary today. They talked about his skills as a magician and the shows he had put on. He would saw his assistant in half, free himself from tricky knots, and hypnotize audience members so they would crow like roosters and hop like bunnies. The shows these people talked about took place years before.

From my pocket, I pull out the patient information sheet I stole from the infirmary. I hand it to Johnny, and he reads aloud Czar’s date of passing: “July eleventh, nineteen thirty-three.” Then he glances up. “It says here he was trampled by a horse in Nevada.”

He closes his eyes, puts down the clipboard, and rubs his temples as though his brain is also breaking.

I say nothing more. I wait. I think of injured horses put out of their misery with a bullet to the brain. Minutes click by. From out of the corner of my eye, I see Rover beetling across the far wall.

“Johnny,” I finally say, “are you hunky-dory?”

His eyes blink open. “I know what must have happened, Boo,” he says, his voice more gravelly than usual. “In September, this Czar kid traveled to Hoffman Estates on a haunting. He broke into somebody’s house, stole a gun, and then went hunting for thirteen-year-olds.”

Oh, Zig in heaven help us all.

“You do not really believe that, do you?” I ask.

He looks vexed. “It’s totally possible!” he insists. “Maybe he even killed other kids during other hauntings. Maybe we aren’t the only ones! We should contact the gommers, get them involved in an investigation. We might find other victims.”

I sigh and say, “Czar is the victim, Johnny.”

He holds up a hand and barks, “Don’t!” Then he leaps up and throws open the door to our hideout. Usually he creeps down the hall to avoid making noise and attracting attention, but this time he runs. I go after him. He passes the restroom and takes the stairs two at a time to the lobby. When I reach it myself, he is already hurrying down a hall to the basketball court. The Marcy is still open, and townies are milling around. I head to the court, and when I arrive, Johnny is climbing an inner staircase to the indoor track built along the circumference of the space. Up on the track, he starts running, not simply jogging, but sprinting at top speed. Around and around he goes. Nobody else is up there. A few boys are practicing shots on the court. I leave him alone. I sit on a bench and wait for the speed demon to come down.

As I watch Johnny, I toy with the idea of leaving him here and biking home to Eleven. Maybe Thelma is back at the Frank and Joe; she will know what to do. I no longer care who killed me or why, and honestly I do not think I ever really did. I prefer investigating something less grisly—for instance, how flashlights work without batteries. That is the only kind of mystery I want to solve.

A half hour later, a do-gooder comes onto the basketball court with a bullhorn. “Closing in ten minutes,” he calls out. “Wrap it up, folks.”

The boys on the court head to the locker room to shower and change. They punch one another on the shoulder. They call one another “Scrotum.” They laugh affably. They are part of a world Johnny used to live in. He needs to go back to that world. When he finally stops jogging and comes down from the suspended track, I have a suggestion. I almost plead with him: “Let’s forget all about Gunboy, Johnny. Tomorrow morning, we can bike back to the Frank and Joe and start over again. We can get jobs. I can work for Curios, and you can teach life-drawing classes. Let’s pretend we died of different causes. Me from a heart defect and you from—I don’t know—a nut allergy.”

My own suggestion surprises me: I do not often pretend. You will recall, Mother and Father, that as a young child I pretended briefly to be evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, but then I decided playacting was dishonest.

Johnny’s face is drawn. Around his head he is wearing a terry-cloth sweatband he must have found discarded on the track. “A nut allergy,” he says, winded. He looks at me as though I am a nut.

I clarify: “Anaphylactic shock.”

He stares at me a moment. “Oh, okay,” he finally mumbles. Then he leaves the basketball court and heads to a drinking fountain in the lobby.

I am taken aback: I was ready for him to scold me for giving up. “Well, good, then,” I call out. “Very good.” I catch up to him. I put up my dukes and punch him lightly on the shoulder when he straightens up from the fountain.

Instead of going down to the basement, he heads out the front door of the Marcy. I follow him around the side of the building. He lies in the grass and stares at the darkening sky.

I remind Johnny of the day of his skitching accident back in Hoffman Estates, when he looked at the clouds awestruck. He scrunches his forehead. “Oh, yeah, I sort of remember that.”

“You said you saw something beautiful, Johnny. What was it?”

“Beats me.”

I lie beside him and look skyward. Pinpricks of stars dot the sky. Soon I must begin mapping them.

“Maybe I was talking about heaven,” Johnny says. “The beauty awaiting us here.”

I turn toward him in the grass. “Really?”

He turns toward me. A single tear drips from his eye and across the bridge of his nose. “No,” he says. Then he barks a laugh and I emit several ha-ha’s. Zig knows what we are laughing about.