Walter and Isabelle and I started hanging out together that summer because of the twins and werewolves and the full moon.

Once I started working at the Blue Potato, the twins would come out to the farm every day and eat Emma’s weird cookies and hang around with the goats and the chickens and try to con Jim into letting them drive his secondhand John Deere. Jim never fell for it, even though Jasper was pretty convincing about being an expert with heavy machinery, which I think proves that Jim’s brain isn’t as fried as my dad says it is.

“Will those potatoes turn your tongue blue when you eat them?” Journey said, hanging over the fence where I was hoeing. “Like drinking grape Kool-Aid turns your tongue purple?”

Journey was wearing rhinestone sunglasses, overall shorts, and pink ballet slippers. Jasper was wearing cowboy boots and a T-shirt that said COME TO THE DARK SIDE. WE HAVE COOKIES.

Journey stuck out her tongue at Jasper, who stuck out his tongue back.

“No,” I said. “They do not turn your tongue blue.”

“I thought they’d turn your tongue blue,” Journey said mournfully.

“Well, they don’t,” I said.

I turned around so that my back was to the twins and hoed harder, but they didn’t take the hint and go away.

“We wondered if you might want to come over to our house tomorrow night,” Jasper said. “Isabelle said to ask you.”

My heart gave a sort of electric thunk.

“She said to ask you day before yesterday,” Journey said. “But Jasper forgot to tell you. Jasper is very forgetful. If you could see the inside of Jasper’s brain, it would be full of soft, fluffy balls of wool.”

In microseconds I thought of several creative awful things I’d like to do to Jasper’s soft woolly forgetful brain.

“If you could see the inside of Journey’s brain,” Jasper said, “it would be full of razor blades.”

Walter says that the twins are the conversational equivalent of a computer virus.

“Our parents think it’s good that Isabelle is showing social interests,” Jasper said. “When our dad said we were spending the summer here, she said oh, no, she wasn’t. She said she wasn’t going to go to some stupid little podunk town that didn’t even have a symphony or an art museum. She wanted to stay in New York and live by herself in a hotel.”

“Like Eloise,” Journey said. “Eloise is a girl in a famous picture book. She lived in the Plaza Hotel in New York and got her meals from room service and had a pet turtle who ate raisins. But Isabelle couldn’t do that because we don’t have enough money for a hotel.”

“Have you ever had a pet turtle?” asked Jasper.

“No,” I said.

“So are you going to come over tomorrow?” Jasper said.

“It’s because of the full moon,” Journey said, bouncing up and down on the fence. “There’s a full moon tomorrow night. Isabelle has a thing about the full moon.”

“If Journey was in outer space,” Jasper said, “she would not be the moon. She would be an Apollo object. That’s an asteroid that’s aimed at smashing into the Earth and destroying all life as we know it.”

“If Jasper was in outer space,” Journey said, “he would be puny pathetic cosmic dust.”

“What time tomorrow?” I said. Resisting a natural impulse to hit them with the hoe.

“Seven thirty,” Journey said. “I’ll give Isabelle your R.S.V.P. That’s how you answer an invitation. It stands for Répondez, s’il vous plaît. That means ‘Answer, please,’ in French. Did I say that I can speak French?”

“You said it,” Jasper said. “You say it a lot. But you can’t.”

“Also Jasper might turn into a werewolf,” Journey said.

“I have all the signs,” Jasper said. “Like I have unusually long middle fingers.” He showed me his hands and spread out his fingers. “See?”

“No,” I said.

“And my ears are a little pointed, and I’m pale,” Jasper said. “Werewolves are always pale.”

“That’s vampires,” I said. “Vampires are always pale. Werewolves are toothy and hairy. Nobody wants to be around a werewolf.”

I thought of Valya Starikova, this Russian kid in my Book of the Dead. She was dragged into the forest and eaten by wolves. Nothing was left but pieces of her shoes.

“Yeah,” Journey said. “Because werewolves bite. Like this.” And she started to gnaw on Jasper’s arm.

Jasper began to yell.

Then Journey said, “I’ll go tell Isabelle!” and cut off running toward the road, and Jasper hollered, “No, I’ll tell her!” and went batting off after her.

So I went back to hoeing and hoed blue potatoes so fast that I came close to hoeing off my toes. I was that excited about having an invitation from Isabelle.

It was just lousy timing that right then Peter Reilly called up to see if I wanted to go to the movies that next night, because his brother, Tony, was going to drive him and Amanda into Fairfield and if I came along, Amanda would bring her girlfriend Yvonne Boudreau, who has a belly-button ring and blue hair. Any other time I would have wanted to go. The blue hair makes Yvonne look like a Martian, but a cute Martian, and she talks a lot, which means you don’t have to say much but can just nod every once in a while and think about your own stuff and look at her chest.

Peter got ticked off when I said no, I was busy.

“Busy with what?” he said. “What have you got to be busy with?”

I didn’t want to tell him, but he kept at it until finally I said, “I promised I’d go over to the neighbors’.”

Then Peter wanted to know which neighbors and what were we going to do there, and I said it was sort of like a club meeting, which was the only thing I could think of to get him off my back. I’ve always been a lousy liar, which is one of the things Eli was always saying we had to work on someday. When he got back from Iraq, he said, we’d devote a whole Education Day to deception and prevarication.

Peter said I sounded stupid, and what was wrong with me and was I turning into a douche, and then he hung up. Which is because the only kind of club Peter knows about is the one his father goes to at the VFW on Friday nights to drink Jim Beam and play poker.

By Saturday, though, I was so nervous that I wished maybe I’d just répondez-vous-ed no to the twins and gone to the movies with Peter and Amanda and blue Yvonne. By seven, I’d changed my clothes three times, brushed my teeth twice, and had had a lot of time to get myself all worked up thinking about what a loser I was going to look like in front of Isabelle, what with not knowing what month I’d be if I was a month and not having a favorite poem.

Then I decided that if things went really wrong, I’d just run away from home and come up with a new identity, like those people in witness-protection programs. I’d go someplace really far away, like Cincinnati, and I’d pretend to have lost my memory, which always works for people in the movies. I doubted anybody would even bother to look for me, because frankly I figured my parents would be relieved.

Actually that all made me feel better, because like Eli always said, it’s always important to have a backup plan. Later I told Walter about it, and he said “Great scheme, Danny,” in a way that told me it wasn’t.

I told my mom where I was going and she said “Fine” without looking away from where she was not exactly watching the TV, in the sort of voice that showed she really wasn’t paying any attention. It left me wondering, the way I always did, if she’d say anything different if I said, “Well, good night, Mom, I’m going out to knock over a liquor store,” or, “Gee, I’ve made this cool parachute out of an umbrella and I’m going to go jump off the Matteson River Bridge and see if it works,” or, “Good-bye, Mom, I’ve decided to move to Timbuktu.”

She didn’t used to be this way. When Eli was home, we’d go out to the kitchen most nights and help Mom make dinner, and she’d say, “Well, tell me things, boys; I haven’t seen you for hours.” And after Eli left for college, she was the same, even though then it was just her and me.

Now I think she wouldn’t even notice if I dropped dead right there on the floor. Like those people in city apartments who die and nobody realizes it for years. Or until there’s a smell.

Once last year I didn’t talk at all for three whole days, just to see what would happen. Nothing did. Which just goes to show.

I waited until twenty past seven, because I didn’t want to be too early, because it’s not cool to be early. Then I took a flashlight, because even though it was still light out, being summer, I knew I’d be coming home in the dark, and also by my third change of clothes I was wearing a black T-shirt, which doesn’t show up on the road if a pickup truck comes along with somebody like Timmy Sperdle in it, full up to the eyeballs with testosterone and Coors. Then I headed off for the Sowers house.