The last thing Beauchamp said to him was, “Don’t forget, now, this is our business deal. It don’t concern nobody else. You take that bag of meat and hide it somewhere, and I’ll bring you more meat tomorrow. In the meantime, you keep your mouth shut.”

At three o’clock, the school bus pulled up, belching and gasping and sighing. Norton and Billy Threemonger started pelting Rob with date palms before the bus even came to a complete stop. The bus door opened and Sistine came running toward him, dodging the dates, looking as serious as a soldier on a battlefield.

“Let’s go see the tiger,” she shouted to him.

Rob was dismayed to see that she was still wearing his shirt and jeans.

“Where’s your dress?” he blurted.

“In here,” she said. She held up the same grocery bag he had given her the night before. “I changed as soon as I got out of the house. My mother doesn’t know. I found a book in the library today and read about big cats. Do you know that panthers live in the woods here? We could set the tiger free, and he could live with them. Come on,” she said. She started to run.

Rob ran, too. But the keys to the cage felt heavy in his pocket, and they bumped up against his leg and slowed him down so that Sistine beat him there. When he arrived, she was standing pressed up against the fence, her fingers wrapped in the chainlink.

“Tigers are an endangered species, you know,” she said. “It’s up to us to save him.”

“Watch out he don’t attack you,” Rob said.

“He won’t. Tigers only attack people if they’re desperately hungry.”

“Well, this one ain’t hungry.”

“How do you know?” Sistine asked, turning around and looking at him.

“Well,” said Rob, “he ain’t skinny, is he? He don’t look starved.”

Sistine stared at him hard.

And Rob opened his mouth and let the word fall out. “Keys,” he said. Every secret, magic word he had ever known — tiger and cancer and Caroline — every word in his suitcase seemed to fall right out of him when he stood before Sistine.

“What?” she said.

“Keys,” he said again. He cleared his throat. “I got the keys to the cage.”

“How?”

“Beauchamp,” he told her. “He hired me to feed his tiger. And he gave me the keys.”

“All right!” said Sistine. “Now all we have to do is open the locks and let him go.”

“No,” said Rob.

“Are you crazy?” she asked him.

“It ain’t safe. It ain’t safe for him. My friend Willie May, she had a bird and let it go, and it just got ate up.”

“You’re not making sense,” she told him. “This is a tiger. A tiger, not a bird. And I don’t know who Willie May is, and I don’t care. You can’t stop me from letting this tiger go. I’ll do it without the keys. I’ll saw the locks off myself.”

“Don’t,” said Rob.

“Don’t,” she mocked back. And then she spun around and grabbed hold of the cage and shook it the same way Beauchamp had earlier that day.

“I hate this place,” she said. “I can’t wait for my dad to come and get me. When he gets here, I’m going to make him come out here and set this tiger free. That’s the first thing we’ll do.” She shook the cage harder. “I’ll get you out of here,” she said to the pacing tiger. “I promise.” She rattled the cage as if she were the one who was locked up. The tiger paced back and forth without stopping.

“Don’t,” said Rob.

But she didn’t stop. She shook the cage and beat her head against the chainlink, and then he heard her gasp. He was afraid that maybe she was choking. He went and stood next to her. And he saw that she was crying. Crying. Sistine.

He stood beside her, terrified and amazed. When his mother was alive — when he still cried about things — she had been the one who comforted him. She would cup her hand around the back of his neck and say to him, “You go on and cry. I got you. I got good hold of you.”

Before Rob could think whether it was right or whether it was wrong, he reached out and put his palm on Sistine’s neck. He could feel her pulse, beating in time with the tiger’s pacing. He whispered to her the same words his mother had whispered to him. “I got you,” he told her. “I got good hold of you.”

Sistine cried and cried. She cried as if she would never stop. And she did not tell him to take his hand away.