Nobody sends a note home about the ecosystem eruption, but Maxie’s in the same school as me, and somehow he heard about what happened. He gives Mom a detailed report as soon as we walk into the house. She looks a little worried, so I say, “Mom, do I have a note from school?”

She shrugs. “Do you?”

“No. It wasn’t important enough to send a note home, which means it isn’t important enough to talk about. Maxie just talks too much.”

“But, Mom, he had to go to the office—” Maxie starts.

“That’s enough, Maxie. It’s Gabe’s story, and you’re starting to sound like a tattletale. And, Gabe, you know something can be worth talking about even if your teacher doesn’t send home a note about it.”

It’s my turn to shrug now. “Okay,” I say.

Then Mom turns to Jake, who gets home from middle school about the same time Maxie and I get home from Franklin. “Hey, big guy,” she says. “How was your day?”

“Fine,” he says. “I need a snack.”

“Okay,” Mom says. “Anyone else? Gabe, Maxie?”

“Peanut butter crackers,” Maxie says.

“I’m not hungry,” I say.

Maxie’s peanut-butter-cracker-eating routine is enough to take away anyone’s appetite. He splits the crackers apart and peels the thin layer of peanut butter off. He piles the twelve scraped-off crackers on one side of his plate and the twelve peanut butter pancakes on the other. Then he smushes the peanut butter layers together and eats them all in one bite—one big glob that he has to roll around his mouth forever before he can swallow it. His next trick is to divide the orange-colored crackers into groups—one day it’ll be two at a time, another day three at a time, up to six crackers—and eat them smushed together in one mouthful. I hate peanut butter crackers.

I head upstairs to my room. What I really want to do is get on the computer, but the computer isn’t in my room. It’s in a little room right off the kitchen, and I don’t feel like being near Maxie and Jake right now. I don’t want to have to explain my game to Jake, and I don’t want to have to deal with Maxie begging for a turn and accidentally spewing orange crumbs every time he says, “Please?”

Sitting at my desk, I gather a stack of paper that I’ve already cut for flipbooks. I draw a bunch of pictures showing a small boy with a big, round head. The boy in the pictures is eating crackers, but not peanut butter crackers. Just plain, round crackers. As he eats, his small body gets bigger and his big head gets smaller, until he is all body and zero head. In the last frame, the boy explodes. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not Maxie. What do I care that he tattled to Mom about my trip to the principal’s office?

A flipbook takes a long time to make and a few seconds to use. I flip through the exploding boy book one more time and then move to my bed, where I reach for a small paperback book on my nightstand. Handbook for the New Aquarist, it’s called. On the cover is a photograph of brightly colored fish swimming around in a sparkling clean aquarium tank. The back cover says:

Congratulations! As a new aquarist, you are about to immerse yourself in a world that is usually invisible to humans—the peaceful, shimmering world of underwater. You’ll find fish of every color, fish with different “personalities,” fish that race around, fish that float languidly.

With the right equipment and care, an aquarium can provide many years of enjoyment to its owner and long life to the fish that call it home. This book will help you become one of the millions of people who enjoy the magical underwater world.

So jump on in—the water’s fine!

Ha, ha, right? That last sentence just makes you want to read the book cover to cover, doesn’t it?

I really like tropical fish, so my parents have said that I can get a tank and set up my own aquarium. First, though, I’m supposed to read up on aquariums so I know what to do. The problem is most books about aquariums are incredibly boring. When I see chapter headings like Choosing a Filtration System or Dealing with Algae, I almost want to forget the whole idea. And if authors think it helps to throw in clever little expressions like “jump on in—the water’s fine!”—well, it doesn’t.

The only good part of the book is the section in the middle with pages and pages of color pictures of tropical fish. With all their stripes and patterns and colors and shapes, they look like living pieces of art. Plus, they have great names: angelfish, tiger barb, skunk catfish, silver dollar, swordtail, clown loach. Then there are the Siamese fighting fish and the kissing gourami. I wonder how those two would get along in a tank together.

Instead of reading about aquariums, I’d rather talk about fish with someone like Dominique, the guy who works at the aquarium store. He knows tons about tropical fish—freshwater fish, saltwater fish, coral reefs, everything. He comes from a different country—Guadeloupe, which is part of France, even though it’s in the Caribbean Sea—where people go snorkeling all the time. Dominique told me that when he was a kid he would just head to the beach with his swim mask and snorkel tube and dive into a strange, quiet world of color and movement. He said that on the surface the water looked like a giant greenish-blue plate. But once you broke the surface, you were in a whole different world.

I can tell by the way his voice gets when he talks about it how much Dominique likes to dive into that other world. But here he is, living miles from any ocean at all and almost two thousand miles from the nice, warm, tropical sea he’s used to.

“My parents’ jobs brought them here,” he told me. “And I can get a good education and earn money here at the store at the same time. So, see, I have my fish and my better life.” He laughed when he said this, but it wasn’t a big laugh.

“It sounds better where you used to live.”

Dominique didn’t answer me directly. Instead he said, “It will be worth it when I get the scholarship and can go to the university. Then I’ll be in one of the best biology programs around, and maybe after that, medical school.”

I think Dominique would make a good doctor. I’d rather tell him what’s hurting me than any other doctor. Dominique takes college courses at the community college, but he says that to get into a good medical school, he needs to go to a good university. And to go to a good university, he needs scholarship money. I hope Dominique gets the money. But then Dominique wouldn’t work in the aquarium store anymore, and I’d have to learn about fish from these boring books.

“Gabe? Gabe, honey. It’s a beautiful day. Why don’t you go outside for a while?”

Instead of answering my mom, I flip through the book and check out the chapter titles: Cleaning Your Aquarium. Aquarium Landscaping. Water Quality. How can they make such a cool hobby sound so boring? “I don’t want to read this,” I say out loud and head downstairs to go outside.

Most of the neighborhood guys are playing soccer in the street in front of our house, as usual. We live in the city—not downtown where the offices and big apartment buildings are, but a few miles away in a neighborhood where the houses are stuck together in rows. Special rules apply to street soccer, mainly to account for the fact that the ball often ends up under one of the cars parked on the street.

My brothers are already out there. Maxie is on Ryan Torrey’s team. I see Jake, who seems to be on Ryan’s team, too, but it’s hard to tell because he’s not following the ball so much as he’s fiddling around with something he probably took out of the kitchen junk drawer.

Suddenly the ball bounces against Jake’s knee. He reacts way too late, of course, but the ball ricochets over to Ryan, who then kicks it over the chalk-drawn goal line to score.

“Yes!” Ryan exclaims. “Thank you, Jake!”

“Hey, Yo-yo, stop playing with that yo-yo if you want to be on my team!” yells Steven Coombs. So Jake isn’t on Ryan’s team after all, even though he just helped them score a goal.

“Sorry,” Jake says. He puts the yo-yo in this pocket and tries to look like a team player. It’s not too hard for him to pull this off. He looks athletic—tan, with strong legs and arms, and humongous hands. I don’t know how he holds little bits of charcoal and skinny paintbrushes in those paws when he does his artwork, but he does.

Ha, I think, looking at Jake trying to look like a team player, we’ll see how long this lasts. Jake and team sports don’t go together. There’s too much downtime for him, even in the most action-packed game. I watch as he crouches with his hands on his thighs, as the other kids do, and as he dances up and back, right and left—again, following the ball around the field as the other kids do. But as the ball moves down the street in the control of the other players, Jake loses interest. As I knew he would. As he always does. Not that I can blame him. I find soccer too boring for words and definitely too boring to play.

“Ja-ake!”

That’s Steven again. This time Jake accidentally “kicked” the ball out of bounds. He didn’t really kick it, since it just kind of bounced off his ankle when he moved his feet. And by a stroke of bad luck, instead of rolling under a car—which doesn’t count as out-of-bounds, but is treated as a do-over— the ball managed to bounce through one of the few empty spaces on the street to the sidewalk. So it is truly out-of-bounds, and now Ryan’s team gets possession.

“Sorry,” Jake says again. “I’m done playing anyway.” No one asks him to stay.

I want to yell. I want to push Steven Coombs’s face in. I want to give Jake a brain transplant.

Jake seems perfectly okay about leaving the game in disgrace. He comes over to where I’m sitting on the concrete stairs that lead up to the front porch of our house.

“I’ve figured out how to walk the dog,” he says. Before I can ask what dog he’s talking about, he takes the yo-yo out of his pocket and does the trick.

“Cool, Jake,” I say, meaning it.

“Wanna try?” he asks. Not really, but he hands me the yo-yo without waiting for my answer. He walks toward the curb, right where he bounced the ball out-of-bounds. I see him bend down and pick up one thing, then another, and another. He’s pushing his straight dark hair out of his eyes and smiling to himself.

“Whee-yuh!” I hear a scream that sounds familiar. “Whee-yuh! Ah-yah-yah-yah-yah-yah!”

Maxie. He sounds like a dog that’s been run over by a car. But I look over at him, and he’s all in one short, curly-headed, skinned-knees-and-knuckles piece. All that’s happened is that he’s blocked Steven’s shot, and he’s so greatly, hugely, gigantically pleased with himself that he’s cheering and laughing as only Maxie can.

“Way to go, kid!” Ryan says. “Hey, Steven, how’s it feel to be blocked by a first grader?”

“Whee-yuh!” Maxie is still shrieking.

And I’m thinking: He’s totally crazy.

I must have said it out loud, because Jake looks over at me and says, “No, he’s not. He’s happy. He’s a first grader who blocked a shot in the sixth-graders’ game. Let him celebrate.”

I spread my hands out wide, as if to say, Hey, am I stopping him?

“Different doesn’t mean crazy, Gabe,” Jake says.

Easy for you to say, I think. Only, as I watch Jake walk up the stairs into the house, I know that it isn’t easy for him to say at all.