I became friends with Walter in the graveyard.

I used to stop by Eli’s grave every once in a while, and if nobody was around, I’d sit down and shoot the breeze and catch him up on stuff.

If you spend enough time in a graveyard, you really get to know the place like you do any other neighborhood. Pretty soon you even have your favorite graves. Mine were Beloved Henry, who got kicked by a horse at the age of six and ended up with a smirky little marble lamb, and Amos Pettigrew, who had a creepy carved skull and a badass epitaph:

Here lies AMOS PETTIGREW

As I am now, so shall you be

Prepare for death and follow me

Gee, thanks, Amos, I used to think, but I visited him anyway. I bet in life he didn’t have many pals.

The most interesting graves were in the old cemetery, which you could get to from the new one by stepping over the fence, which wasn’t hard, since most of it was lying on its side. That’s where the five little Wheeler kids were, and theirs were some of my favorite graves too. I used to go over and sit on the big Wheeler-parent gravestone and look at all those little stones lined up beside it like a row of granite ducklings.

SAFE IN THE ARMS OF THE ANGELS, the big parent stone said.

I wondered what the angels had been doing while whatever happened to the little Wheeler kids was happening, like lightning or bears or bubonic plague. Not doing their guardian-angel thing — that was pretty obvious. Maybe they’d all been goofing off at some celestial harp jam.

I was so wrapped up in blasphemous anti-angel thoughts that when this voice behind me said, “Hi, Danny,” I nearly jumped out of my skin. The first thing I thought was Zombies! which goes to show the kind of thing you’re primed for if you’ve spent Halloween at Peter Reilly’s house with the lights out, watching Night of the Living Dead.

But when I turned around, it was just old weird Walter, in a pair of ratty corduroy pants and geeky high-top sneakers and that haircut that made it look like his head had been chewed by squirrels.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Walter said. “I thought you heard me.”

“You didn’t scare me,” I said. Lying slightly.

“I see you up here a lot,” Walter said. “But I figured you wanted to be alone. Most people in a graveyard want to be left alone. I can leave if you want me to. Do you want me to leave you to be alone?”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “Stick around.”

Walter sat down across from me on Jedediah Kimball, 1857–1904, who was now IN A BETTER PLACE. His corduroys rode up to show white socks and some white hairy leg. You could tell Walter was the type who would never get a tan.

I pointed at all the little Wheeler stones.

“What do you suppose they died of, all at once like that?”

“Diphtheria,” Walter said. “Before inoculations, it sometimes killed eighty percent of children under ten.”

His eyes started doing that back-and-forth thing. I know now that it was the cerebral manipulation of information, but at the time I figured he was having an epileptic fit. I’d heard about epileptic fits, and I knew that if somebody had one, you were supposed to put a stick in their mouth to keep them from biting off their tongue. But just as I started looking around for a good strong stick, Walter started talking again.

“It makes you think,” Walter said. “All the scrambling around and worrying and stuff we do. And then we die. We’re gone, just like that. And we think all the time that it matters, all the stuff we do, when the truth is that we’re all nothing anyway. Mathematically speaking.”

I realized right then that I’d been hanging around with the twins too much because the first thing I thought was that if Walter was a Pooh character, he’d be that depressing donkey. Eeyore.

“What do you mean, we’re all nothing?” I said.

Walter said, “The universe has maybe a hundred billion galaxies in it. And each of those galaxies has somewhere between a billion and a trillion stars.”

“Yeah?” I said.

Walter said, “And orbiting around just one of those trillions and trillions of stars is our planet, which has six billion people on it. We’re like dust spots on a dust spot in the middle of a dust spot. Mathematically speaking, we average out to absolutely nothing.”

Mathematically speaking is one of Walter’s expressions.

I knew there was a good reason I hated math.

“You know what else?” Walter said. “There’s a philosopher who thinks maybe we’re not even here at all. He says our whole reality might be a computer game played by some incredibly advanced civilization. You know, like we’re the Sims.”

“That’s nuts,” I said.

But I could feel myself starting to worry about the time when I took the ladder out of the Sims’ little swimming pool and just left them to swim back and forth until they croaked.

Then I thought how pissed I’d be if that turned out to be true and Eli died because some dumb-ass Little Green Kid from Alpha Centauri got bored and clicked DELETE.

Walter got down off Jedediah, walked over, and started poking with his high-top sneaker at the little Wheeler graves.

“What do you think happens after we die?” I said.

Walter got that struggle expression people get when you’ve asked them an awkward question and they’re about to give you an answer you don’t want to hear.

“Nothing,” Walter said finally. “I think once the brain stops working, we cease to exist and all the molecules and atoms that we’re made of drift off to become part of something else.”

“Like what kind of something else?” I said. “Like reincarnation?”

Walter rolled his eyes and kept poking the grass with his toe.

“Like recycling,” he said. “Like grass. Squirrels. Worms.”

I thought Eli might like to be part of a squirrel. Or maybe a bird. Eli always said if he could have one X-gene mutant superpower, he’d like to be able to fly.

“What about your soul?” I said. “Don’t you believe in souls?”

Pastor Jay and the Methodist Sunday School had been pretty definitive on the subject of souls.

“Look, you asked me,” Walter said. “I’m not saying there’s no heaven full of people running through fields of flowers. I’m just saying what I think, is all.”

“Hey. That’s cool,” I said.

“Not usually, it isn’t,” Walter said.

He grinned at me suddenly, and I saw that he had this crookedy grin that went up a little bit more on one side than the other, just like Eli’s. I realized I’d never seen Walter smile before.

I guess that was when Walter and I became friends.

Things Walter loves are irrational numbers, Big Bang theory, Rube Goldberg machines, chess, licorice, Linux, the Grand Canyon, the M13 galaxy, octopuses, graphing calculators, Dr Pepper, and the Periodic Table of Elements. Things he hates are nonserious people, astrology, baseball caps on people who aren’t playing baseball, Mickey Mouse, the British royal family, Twinkies, lima beans, social events, homeopathy, and preemptive war. The people he admires are Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, and Bertrand Russell.

And the guy who wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I know that because in his Facebook picture he’s got two heads and he claims his name is Zaphod Beeblebrox.