Townies can stop eating all they want, but they will never grow thinner. Thelma went on a drastic diet early in her stay in Town, but she says she simply grew so weak she started hallucinating (toucans flocking in the trees and dolphins swimming through the clouds). Whether we can die from abstaining from food nobody seems to know, because nobody—not even a sadcon at the Deborah—has stopped eating long enough.

The hypnotist Charles “Czar” Lindblom is no longer in a coma, and once he started coming around, he was fed the types of food a baby eats: mashed potatoes, applesauce, gruel. He is now strong enough to serve as a witness at Johnny’s trial, which gets under way in a week’s time.

It feels lonely having my room to myself. I am glad Johnny left many of his drawings behind to adorn the walls. He did a series called Wish Come True. For example, there is one drawing of Thelma dressed in pearls and a sparkly gown like the dress a jazz singer might wear onstage.

He asked me to choose a subject for my own portrait. I told him to give me time to decide on a suitable wish. Were he here now, I would ask him to draw the two of us lying in the snow in Hoffman Estates and gazing at the wispy moon. In that moment, we were truly resting in peace.

Around seven o’clock, Thelma and Esther knock on my door because we are supposed to go to a play together. Plenty of plays, concerts, magic shows, choreographies, and acrobatics will be staged tonight. You see, on New Year’s Eve, townies present the most beautiful art they created in the past year. All across Town, painters exhibit their finest paintings, and sculptors their best sculptures. Guitarists play the compositions that make them proudest. Harpists strum their most angelic pieces. Singers sing their most heartrending songs. Poets stand on soapboxes and recite their most elegant poems, and storywriters read aloud their most inspired work. Townies claim they do all these things to thank Zig, but I believe they are also trying to prove they are bearing up well despite the box (i.e., the terrarium) that their god has confined them to.

Just after we leave the Frank and Joe, Esther turns to Thelma and me in the street. She is wearing a fake mink stole, what she calls her “fun fur.”

“Let’s make a pact,” she says. “That tonight we won’t talk about it.”

Thelma nods in agreement. “We need a break, at least for a few hours.”

“Okay,” I say, even though I feel like a traitor.

The play we will see is called The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. Thelma says it is about a girl awestruck by science and mistreated by her crazy mother. It is right up our alley because I am fond of science and Esther had an overbearing mother (who nicknamed her daughter Li’l, a name Esther loathed).

We head down the street, which is teeming with bicycles and pedestrians. Everybody seems to be out this evening. Townies sing aloud and do dance steps on the sidewalk. A boy does a triple cartwheel across the lawn of his dorm and then a somersault in the air. Do-gooders climb trees in a park to hang balloons and streamers from the branches.

Exhibition tables are set up along the sidewalks. At one table sits a boy who creates origami creatures (tiger, grasshopper, giraffe, pterodactyl) and silver necklaces like those that children in America make out of gum wrappers (Town has no gum, so he uses aluminum foil). Beside him is a girl who makes shoebox dioramas of scenes from novels (for example, a jungle scene from Tarzan of the Apes). Beside her is a boy who makes papier-mâché masks, one of which has a schnozzola like Uncle Seymour’s.

A girl with hair that looks cut with a Weedwacker comes up to me in the street. “You’re Boo, right?” she says. “The murdered kid?” People recognize me lately, though there are no newspapers or television reports here to display my photograph.

“Just want to say,” she says with a shy smile, “that I’m rooting for you.” She places a hand on my shoulder, but Esther brushes it off for me.

“Rooting for me,” I say. “What do you mean?”

“Well, the kid who shot you, I think he really should get—”

Thelma cuts in: “We’re late for a play.”

The girl goes on: “His just deserts.”

I do not know how to reply, so I concentrate on etymology. “The expression ‘just deserts’ doesn’t mean the cake or cookie we eat after a meal,” I tell the girl. “It means what a person justly deserves.”

The girl blinks at me. “Yeah, I know. And your killer deserves to be hung.” She does a pantomime of tightening a noose around her own neck.

Thelma pats her heart.

“The correct past participle is ‘hanged,’ ” I say.

“We’re not talking about it tonight!” Esther yells at the girl, her arms gesturing wildly. “So shut your big fat ignorant mouth!”

The girl backs away as though Esther is a snarling dog.

This brief encounter seems to ruin any pretense of a festive mood. On the rest of our walk to the theater, the three of us speak little. Luckily, however, the play turns out to be excellent. In it, a girl named Tillie Hunsdorfer exposes marigolds to radioactivity. Some of the flowers wither and die, while others mutate into odd but splendid creatures.

Thelma has warned us she often cries at the theater, and she does in fact weep during the final scene where Tillie’s mother murders Tillie’s pet rabbit. Esther hands Thelma tissues from her purse, which is decorated with felt sunflowers.

I, of course, do not weep. I am not used to attending plays. In America, as you know, Mother and Father, I did not go to the theater. I did not watch situation comedies or police dramas on television. I did not read novels. I did not do any of the things requiring a leap into a fictional world. I did not understand the need for fiction when real-life events—the true dramas occurring at the cellular level in our bodies and at the astrophysical level in our universe—were so fantastic and fascinating.

Only in the real world of heaven have I discovered a use for make-believe. One benefit of fiction: it puts your mind off your reality when your reality is off-putting. I wish I had made this discovery back in America. Maybe Lord of the Flies would have helped me survive junior high.

When the play is over and we are discussing the merits of its fictional world in the lobby of the school, we are brought back to reality by a poster thumbtacked to a cork bulletin board. The title of the poster reads, THE SON OF THE SON OF SAM.

It is about Johnny. His crimes. His upcoming trial. The local gommer group is urging townies to demonstrate outside the Gene throughout the trial. I read aloud: “ ‘A bloodthirsty killer is in our midst and may strike again if we do not—’ ”

Esther rips down the poster and crumples it before I can read to the end. “Damn gommers,” she says, narrowing her eyes at Thelma. Thelma has in fact been kicked out of the local gommer group because she wavers on the need to punish crimes committed before a townie passed into heaven. The word around Town is that if Johnny is found guilty, the gommers are pushing for a public stoning.

“I wish we could get away from heaven,” Thelma says. “I wish we could go on a haunting to my grandma’s house in Louisiana. We could pick peaches and make a pie. We could save a slice for Johnny to end his hunger strike.”

Esther rolls her eyes at the idea. “Oh, for f*ck sake,” she says, adopting Johnny’s expression.

Thelma looks dejected, and I probably look sad and confused.

“You two deadbeats need to cheer the hell up,” Esther says. “It’s New Year’s Eve!”

“I’m scared what’ll happen,” Thelma whispers. “Gommers gunning for a stoning. Johnny not eating.”

“Our pact!” Esther cries, hands on hips.

We go sit under a weeping willow in a park. Around us, revelers play flutes, harmonicas, and Jew’s harps. People sing show tunes, disco songs, and jazz standards. I ask the girls about their plans for the New Year.

Thelma will put together a musical on the life of Miss Otis from the Cole Porter song. She will write, direct, and star. Because Miss Otis was crazy, Thelma will call the musical Out to Lunch.

Esther will design clothes for other fashionable townies using the sewing machine in her room. Her tastes run to high fashion, so she will make items like pleated skirts and ruffled blouses. She will knit sweater vests out of acrylic yarn. She also has “a hippie, groovy side” and will draw dozens of peace symbols with a Magic Marker on a canvas belt and bouquets of daisies on a vinyl purse.

I tell the girls I plan to write a guide to grammar and punctuation titled Who Is Whom? I may also take some literature classes. Students learn about the history of the American South by reading Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. They learn about the Roaring Twenties by reading The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises. They learn about justice by reading To Kill a Mockingbird. They learn some French by reading Tintin.

I will also start work part-time at Curios right after the holiday. Peter Peter wants me to help him with a new exhibition spotlighting curious townies, late thirteen-year-olds who made a name for themselves in odd ways in their afterlife.

For example, the late Frederick Koenig was a big-calved boy who, for nine years in a row, won the Tour de Paradis, a bicycle race along the streets bordering the four Great Walls.

The late Diego Alvarez, a baker’s son, became Town’s most celebrated chef. He whipped up mouthwatering recipes that most townies had never tasted before, like stuffed charred peppers, maple butternut soup, and portobello mushroom risotto. He left behind a cookbook titled Diego’s Diner.

The late Lesley Gapper was a postmistress who came up with the zip codes assigned to the different blocks in the thirteen zones. Each code is a three-letter pronounceable word, like HAM, ROW, TIP, and GUT. As a result, people living on the different blocks sometimes call themselves hammers, rowers, tippers, and gutters.

On the subject of neologisms, the late Monica Schneider created a glossary of heavenisms, words coined here or used differently here than in America. She typed dozens and dozens of copies of her glossary to distribute. The words include “townie,” “gommer,” “do-gooder,” “sadcon,” “old boy,” and another I have learned recently, “countdowner.”

A countdowner is somebody who stands on a rooftop on New Year’s Eve and counts down minutes and seconds while townies gather around to shout “Thank Zig!” simultaneously when the clock strikes midnight.

In fact, I will be the countdowner at the Frank and Joe tonight, so the girls and I walk back to my dorm. We head to the roof, where a dozen townies are wandering about with flashlights or penlights in their hands. Gym mats are spread everywhere so we can lie and gaze at Zig’s sky as we await the spiritual moment when we will all thank our god and the lucky stars he gave us.

Over the next half hour, more and more townies appear on the roof of the Frank and Joe—not only residents but also guests from other dorms. All around me people choose a gym mat and lie down. Esther and Thelma do likewise on either side of me. As tonight’s countdowner, I am the only person allowed to stay standing. I am also the only person permitted to speak before the time comes to give thanks. I stand between Esther and Thelma, a hand grasping a bullhorn and my eyes on my glow-in-the-dark ghost. When Casper’s little hand points north and his big hand hits ten, I shout into the bullhorn: “Ten minutes!” An echo sweeps over us because countdowners all across Town are yelling the same thing, our wristwatches synchronized.

I stare skyward and picture you, Mother, with your smile that exposes your gums, and you, Father, with your eyelids that droop when you are tired.

I get lost in my thoughts and miss my Casper cue. “Five minutes!” comes the call from surrounding buildings. Shoot! I make my announcement, but a few seconds late.

I look up at my three-legged horse hovering in the stars. While I stare at my constellation, the stars forming its tail start to move. I blink several times, but they keep moving back and forth as though the horse is wagging its tail like a dog. Goose bumps rise on my arms. Is this a spiritual moment?

“Zig?” I whisper in the night.

I glance down at Esther and Thelma. By now all flashlights are off, so I cannot make out their expressions. Do they see the wagging stars? Does anyone else? Nobody around me seems startled or alarmed. Everyone gazes heavenward. There is barely a sound, other than an occasional cough or sneeze and the skin of people’s limbs unsticking now and then from the vinyl mats.

I check Casper just in time. “One minute!” I shout together with countdowners atop all the surrounding dorms.

I glance back at the horse, but its tail has come to a rest, fixed again in the heavens. My eyes must be playing tricks on me tonight.

Throughout Town, hundreds and hundreds of reborn thirteen-year-olds prepare to thank Zig for their life after death. In fact, we townies form a kind of Milky Way, each of us a star in a galaxy of Zig’s making. Esther Haglund, Thelma Rudd, Peter Peterman, Reginald Washington, Tim and Tom Lu, Charles Lindblom, Sandy Goldberg, and of course Johnny Henzel.

The final countdown begins. Into my bullhorn, I shout: “Ten Mississippi! Nine Mississippi! Eight Mississippi! Seven Mississippi! Six Mississippi! Five Mississippi! Four Mississippi! Three Mississippi! Two Mississippi! One Mississippi!”

Off go all the streetlamps as a roar rises into the night skies. A flare erupting from the mouth of every boy and every girl across the land. A cry that is meant to be gratitude but that sounds strangely like anger.

“THANK ZIG!”