After I bolt away from zoo, I drift through the vast stretches of bungalows that populate Hoffman Estates. On one street, a little girl about seven years old asks if I would like a before-dinner mint. She is standing at the end of her driveway with a fake tiara on her head. In her hand, she has a hard candy wrapped in green cellophane. I am touched by her kindness, particularly since Zig does not give us townies candy.

A little later, as I am sucking on the mint, I step into the road without looking both ways and nearly get clipped by a station wagon. “Watch it, goofball!” the driver yells. I realize I am now on Meadow Lane, the street where Johnny and I once lay in the snow to watch the heavens.

I meander around Sandpits for a while. Have you gone to Anchorage, dear Mother and Father? When we sailed to Alaska, we all expressed a wish to move there one day. Are you in the land of the moose? Without your presence here, Sandpits no longer holds much appeal, so I vamoose and head toward Helen Keller.

As I cross the long field that stretches out behind the school, I feel a queasiness in my gut. I do not understand my reaction until, in the yellowing grass, I spot an empty can of cola lying on its side. I stop in my tracks. I recall that this is the field where Kevin Stein, Nelson Bliss, and Henry Axworthy attacked me with stones on the first day of eighth grade.

I also remember something I had forgotten.

After my attackers threw their rocks and I fell to the ground stunned and bleeding, they stood over me and made a pact. Pig-nosed Kevin held his hand to his heart and put on a solemn voice. “I pledge to make every day of this school year a living hell for Oliver ‘Boo’ Dalrymple,” he said. Nelson repeated the line, and so did Henry. Then, the three of them together cried, “One nation under God, amen!”

There was an empty can of pop lying nearby. Lemon soda. Kevin picked up the can. Then he unzipped the fly of his jeans and fished around for his penis. He did not turn away. He dared me to watch. I closed my eyes, but I could hear him. He was urinating into the pop can. The sound was like liquid being poured into a beaker.

“Hold him down,” he told Nelson and Henry, who then sat on my arms.

I told myself it did not matter: after all, it was mostly water with traces of inorganic salts and organic compounds. Relax and just swallow, I told myself. Yet I did not surrender quietly this time. I fought. I screamed. I tried hooking my legs around my assailants to knock them off. I did not manage, though. Nelson’s grimy fingers wrenched my mouth open, and Kevin poured the warm urine down my throat. I sputtered and choked. It went up my bloody nose, all over my face, in my hair, and even in my ears.

They won. They would always win.

How strange that I am recalling this now.

It is a memory that Zig found fit to erase.

For thirteen years, this memory lay in a kind of vault. Also in there was the despair I felt. It comes back to me now. Even after they left me, I remained lying in this field for an hour or two. Drained. Forlorn. Beaten.

Now, in the distance, a half dozen kids run screaming across the same field. Whether they are terrorizing one another or just playing I cannot tell. A robin lands a yard away. It stares at me, head tilted one way and then the other, as though I am a tricky puzzle it is trying to solve.

“Hello, angel,” I say to the bird.

It flies away, and then I walk over to the empty can of pop. I jump up and down on the thing till it is good and flat. Then I pick it up and wing it across the field like a Frisbee.

I head back to the long brick school that is Helen Keller. I worry its doors may be locked because it is now suppertime. Will I need to break in? But no, the doors are open, and a few boys mill around in the lobby. They are dressed in what look like pajamas but are actually judo uniforms tied with orange belts. They pay me no mind. I walk down the hall past showcases with sports trophies locked behind glass.

Johnny won track-and-field trophies for Helen Keller in seventh grade. I expect, however, that he was not allowed to complete eighth grade here. Which school did he attend instead? A kind of reform school, I imagine.

Zig permitted this haunting, I suppose, to show me that Johnny has managed to carry on with his life, even though certain ghosts haunt him still. I am one of those ghosts. Perhaps I helped him today. I dearly hope so.

When I reach my old locker, I see that No. 106 is padlocked. I assume I know the combination: I turn the dial to 7, to 25, and then to 34. I yank the lock and it opens.

I check behind me, but no one is around. Only Helen Keller’s eyes watch from across the hall.

I squeak the door open, expecting the rear panel to be missing and the locker to be empty. But the panel is in place and the locker full. The objects in it, though, do not belong to the Asian girl I met earlier in the hallway. Holy moly, they belong to me!

My periodic table is taped to the back of the door. Above it are my photos of Jane Goodall and Richard Dawkins. Jane with her sleek blond ponytail and her pursed lips. Richard with his impish grin and his unruly eyebrows. “Hello there, hello,” I say. “You two look good. You have not aged a single day.”

My compass and protractor set is in my locker, as are my chemistry and mathematics textbooks. My school copy of Lord of the Flies, its spine still unbroken. My forest green cardigan sweater that Grandmother gave me for my thirteenth birthday. My French-English dictionary. My cracked-vinyl gym bag with my gym clothes still inside: yellow shorts, Trojan T-shirt, even a jockstrap.

I riffle through my belongings. At the back of the top shelf is a paper bag. I assume it is the lunch you made me thirteen years ago, Mother and Father. I pull it toward me. It is heavy. Heavier than a peanut butter sandwich, a granola bar, and a box of raisins should be.

I open the paper bag.

Inside is a revolver.

Not the one from Curios.

Uncle Seymour’s gun.

I glance up. Helen Keller stares at me from her wall. She nods her mortarboard head. At least in my mind she does.

Then I remember.

Me aiming this gun at my own chest. Johnny yelling, “No!” Throwing himself at me. The panic in his eyes. The scars on his wrists. The wrenching and the wrestling. The loud bang.