JOHN D HAD NOT slept well either. After supper a really troubling thought had hit him. At the first opportunity Deanie and Clara were going to snoop in his suitcase! They would have done it this afternoon if he hadn’t been sitting there looking at a magazine.

With that thought he had felt himself writhing like a snail turned out of its shell. He had never before been concerned about his privacy. His mother believed parents should respect their children’s property absolutely—she had written an entire column on it. But Deanie and Clara—they obviously respected nothing. He felt as if he had fallen into the hands of creatures no longer governed by human values.

As the night wore on he imagined the girls ruthlessly tearing through his suitcase, pulling out one article after another.

“Look at this!” Clara would cry. “Asthma pills!” She would whinny like a horse.

And Deanie—Deanie would be laughing so hard, she would not be able to speak. “He—he—he—” she would cry, waiting for the hilarity to let up. “He—he—he wears Fruit of the Loom underwear!”

Then he sat straight up in his bed, mouth open with shock. His manuscript. What a time they would have with that!

“Listen to this,” Clara would cry. “‘A runny nose is particularly ineffective.’”

“He—he—he,” Deanie would answer.

He put one hand to his forehead. The thought of his words, the words he had written with such care, the thought of those words being read aloud by idiots—it was more than he could bear.

And perhaps they would come across the notebook in which he was practicing his autograph. Twenty-seven pages of his name, written over and over, line after line, so that when he became famous, he would have a bold, distinctive signature instead of the tiny uninteresting name he put to his homework papers. They would never understand that.

He got out of bed, stood on the bare sandy floor, and looked around the moonlit room. It was a room without hiding places—a chest, two beds, a table, his suitcase. He could possibly hide his manuscript and notebook under the mattress, but that would be the first place they would look.

“Aha!” Clara would cry, pulling up the mattress like a playful gorilla, and Deanie would once again answer, “He—he—he.”

He had stood a long time in the moonlight, as bothered as a prisoner trying to hide something in a bare cell. Then he had crawled back into bed and let out a sigh so long, it seemed to empty his body of air.

He lay without moving, his legs drawn up to his chest. A miserable knot of humanity, he stared at the wall like a sick person waiting for his medicine to start working. With the first light of dawn he had fallen into a troubled sleep of an hour and fifteen minutes.

Now it was morning. Miserable, suspicious, vengeful, and unrested, he followed his mother to the car.

“Here, hold this,” she said cheerfully, handing him her purse. She tied a blue bandanna on her head, looking in the side-view mirror. “How are you getting along with Sam’s daughters?”

“As expected.”

“Did you play Monopoly last night?”

“Hardly.”

“Now, John D, they are very nice girls.” She put her dark glasses on top of her scarf and looked at him. “Especially Clara. I believe you two could—”

“They are hardly nice girls, Mom.”

She hesitated. “Then,” she said with a faint smile, “you should be getting along well. You told me the other day that you hate everything nice, so if they aren’t nice, well, then you should enjoy their company.”

“I have never admired or enjoyed stupidity,” he said in the calm cool voice that always stopped her.

“John D—” He met her eyes without blinking. She hesitated, then pulled her dark glasses over her eyes. “At least let other people have a good time.”

“I’m not stopping anybody.”

“I have to sit by a window!” It was Clara. “I get carsick.” She was coming down the steps behind Deanie and her father. Her face was red, her cheeks as puffed as an adder’s.

“Here, here’s your purse,” John D said quickly. He thrust it at his mother before the girls could see it on his arm and go into another one of those explosions of laughter they were so famous for.

“How’s it going this morning, John D?” Sam asked, and then said in a lower voice to Delores, “I’ve never seen that outfit before. I like you in blue.”

He leaned forward. Delores smiled and fluttered her eyelashes like a lovesick cat in a cartoon.

John D turned away in disgust. He did this just in time to see Deanie turn to Clara, grinning and fluttering her eyelashes in a perfect imitation of his mother. Did she—he wondered suddenly—imitate him as well?

He drew in his breath, turned, tried to get in the car so quickly that he stumbled, fell, and struck his shin. Pain shot all the way up to his eyebrows. He knelt in the backseat, bent over, unable to move.

“We’re not in that big a hurry,” his mother said. Her laughter was low, amused. She leaned forward then and put one hand on his back. “I’m sorry. Did you hurt yourself?” Her voice was concerned now.

“No.”

His face, turned away from his mother, was red, burning hot. His voice, when he managed to speak again, was cool.

“I fell,” he went on, “in order to test the humor level of the group. As I suspected, it is low.”

He got to his feet. “On a scale of one to ten, I rate the group as a two, the category for those who laugh at the world’s misfortunates.”

“No one laughed,” his mother said uneasily.

John D sat and faced forward. Now, at last, I hate every single person present, he thought.

“Well, let’s go,” Sam said. He pressed the girls into the backseat, Deanie on one side of John D, Clara on the other.

The car started. Shells crunched beneath the tires. As they turned left out of the driveway John D bumped into Deanie’s shoulder. As they turned right onto the road he touched Clara’s. I’m going to be clanging back and forth between these idiots all the way to the amusement park, he thought. He closed his eyes.

Trapped between the Animal and the Vegetable, all lines of escape cut off, what will be the fate of the proud young hero? Who will survive? Tune in—

For once he failed to amuse himself.

Twenty miles down the road, when they were driving over the causeway, one of a long line of cars and campers and trailered boats, with his mother reading aloud from a guidebook to Carolina Islands, he leaned down and felt the knot on his leg. At least that was not disappointing—a good solid lump.

He sat back in his seat, partially satisfied, and watched the road ahead.

“This is interesting,” his mother was saying. “The loggerhead sea turtle comes ashore and lays eggs here. Wouldn’t you love to see that?” She marked the page and turned. “Oh, and listen to this. Pirates used to hide in these islands and …”