Jonathan didn’t dare go back to visit the library that day. If he was seen ducking off into the passageways, Sebastian would be sure to think that he was helping Colin.

Sebastian spent the rest of the morning sulking in his room or storming around the kitchen, chewing and slamming cupboard doors. With their leader so ill-tempered, all the boys laid low. Some played cards or hung out on the stairs watching the water, but the Robinson Crusoe group lay on their mattresses and listened to Jonathan read more of the story. By lunchtime, there was only a thin pinch of pages left of the book.

Jonathan was halfway through his peanut butter sandwich when a shadow fell across the table. He looked up to see Benny’s sour face glowering at him.

“Sebastian wants to see you in his room,” he said.

“Okay,” Jonathan answered, taking another bite.

“Now,” Benny said. Jonathan put his sandwich down and followed Benny up the passageway to the adults’ rooms.

They walked past the door to the Admiral’s office, still closed and locked. The next door in the hall stood open, and Benny led him through it.

Inside, Sebastian was lying on a huge, high bed. It was fancy and old-fashioned, with a tall pole at each corner and thick curtains that ran between them. All the curtains around the bed were pulled open and Sebastian lay propped up on a pile of pillows, watching a TV that was blaring on a little desk at the foot of the bed.

“Here he is,” Benny announced proudly.

“Leave us alone, Benny,” Sebastian said with a bored voice. Benny frowned and gave Jonathan a dirty look and then walked out, closing the door behind him.

Sebastian sat up and scowled at the TV.

“The reception sucks,” he said. “You can’t hardly see a thing.”

Jonathan shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

Sebastian blew out an impatient breath and slid off the bed. He sat down at the foot of the bed and clicked the TV off, then looked up at Jonathan.

“Where is he?” he asked.

Jonathan didn’t have to ask who Sebastian was talking about.

“I don’t know,” he answered truthfully.

“You’re his friend,” Sebastian persisted. “And I know you’ve been creeping around this place.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Jonathan repeated. “This place is huge. He never told me he was leaving.”

“I want him back. I don’t like him being out there. It’s not … right. I’m supposed to be in charge, right? I’m supposed to be taking care of everybody. I should know where he is, right?” Sebastian’s eyes were sharp and troubled.

Jonathan shrugged. “It’s not your fault,” he said at last. “He ran away. You didn’t make him leave.”

Sebastian looked away and nodded, then his eyebrows lowered and he looked back to Jonathan.

“If you do see him, would you tell me?”

Jonathan swallowed and looked away. He didn’t answer.

Sebastian frowned and shook his head.

“It didn’t have to be like this,” he said. “We could be doing this together, you know.”

Jonathan looked at him.

“Doing what?”

“Running this thing. Being in charge. You’re smart. This was all your idea, remember. You didn’t have to make me the bad guy.”

“I didn’t make you anything,” Jonathan protested.

“Yeah?” Sebastian jumped to his feet. Jonathan took a step back. “Someone has to be the boss. Someone has to make it work. How else do you make everyone write a letter? How else do you make sure no one tells the boat guys? How else do you get people to feed the furnace? Huh? How do you make it all work otherwise?”

Jonathan didn’t have an answer. “I don’t know. But I don’t want to be in charge. I just want … I just want …”

“What, Johnny? What do you want?”

Jonathan blinked hard and looked at the floor.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I don’t want anything, I think. And that’s the problem.”

He could feel Sebastian still glaring at him, could hear his angry breathing.

“Why did you even suggest all this? Do you like it here?”

Jonathan shrugged and looked up into Sebastian’s face.

“I don’t like it out there,” he replied. “I just didn’t want to go back to—all that. Here I can just be … nothing.”

Sebastian regarded him for a moment. Then he nodded one small nod.

“Yeah. I don’t like it out there either.”

They stood looking at each other for a second. Then Jonathan’s eyes dropped away and Sebastian walked over to a low dresser. A basket full of the Admiral’s chocolates was on top. All around it, and spilling onto the floor, were wadded-up empty gold wrappers.

Sebastian unwrapped a chocolate and popped it into his mouth.

“You want one?”

“No, thanks.”

“They’re almost gone, you know. The chocolates, I mean. And without the damned key, I can’t get into the Admiral’s office to get any more.”

Jonathan looked up at him. “I’m glad we can’t get in there,” he said quietly.

Sebastian’s brow furrowed. “Why?”

Jonathan didn’t blink or hesitate. “Because our files are in there. All the lists of the bad things we’ve done. The bad things we are.” His eyes dropped to the floor. “I like it better like this. We’re just the Scars, together. Whatever we did out there doesn’t matter.” He looked at Sebastian. “If that door opens, we just become our crimes again.”

For a moment, there was only the sound of Sebastian’s noisy chewing. Then he asked a question, but his mouth was so full and sticky that Jonathan didn’t understand it at first.

“What?”

Sebastian swallowed.

“I said, why are you so damned sad? I never seen a kid as sad-looking as you all the time.”

Jonathan looked away, around the room, then over at the window. Through the thick glass, he could see gathering black storm clouds.

Instead of answering, he asked a question of his own.

“How come you never write a letter, Sebastian?”

There was no answer for a long time. The gold wrapper fell from Sebastian’s hand and fluttered to the thick rug on the floor.

“Shut up, Johnny,” he finally said. “Go on, get out of here.”

Jonathan nodded and walked to the door. Sebastian followed him and stood in the doorway.

“It’s funny,” he said, just before he closed the door in Jonathan’s face. “You wanna stay because here you get to be nothing. And I wanna stay because here I get to be something.”

The door closed with a click, and Jonathan stood for a moment before finding his way back downstairs to join the others.

Jonathan’s toes connected solidly with the ball, sending it bouncing across wet stone to Walter’s waiting feet. The ball—an ancient leather soccer ball that someone had found in an old storeroom—was hard enough that it actually hurt a little to kick it. Walter loved it, though, and was always pleading with the other boys to come out and play soccer. Walter passed it back and forth between his feet a few times and then launched it to Jonathan.

It was almost dinnertime, and the sky was getting dark. The game Walter had tried to organize had been called off when the clouds started to sprinkle, and only Jonathan and Walter were left outside.

“How you think Colin’s doing?” Walter asked.

Jonathan kicked the ball back to him.

“I don’t know. Fine, probably. He’s pretty smart.”

“Pretty? That kid’s crazy smart. He ain’t, like, super tough, though, you know?”

Jonathan sighed.

“Yeah. I’m worried about him. He’s, uh, not exactly the Slabhenge type.”

Walter laughed.

“Slabhenge type? Is anybody? I mean, what’s the ‘Slabhenge type,’ man?”

Jonathan pursed his lips thoughtfully. He thought of Miguel and his wicked grin. He thought of Tony, who always cooked up something crazy in the kitchen and tried to get other kids to try it. He thought of Jason, a kid who supposedly stole cars but tried to slip a note to his mom because he just wanted to go home. He thought of quiet David, busted and sent here for fighting back. He thought of Walter, laughing and begging kids to come outside and play. He even thought of Sebastian, who acted so tough but who had noticed Jonathan’s sadness and asked about it.

“I don’t know,” he answered. Then he grinned and looked toward the dining room. “Roger and Gregory, I guess,” he said in a low voice. “And Benny. Benny’s definitely the Slabhenge type.”

Walter returned the grin.

“Oh, yeah. He fits right in here with the rats, don’t he?”

The ball tumbled back and forth between them.

“You know, you’ve never asked me,” Walter said.

“Asked you what?”

“You’ve never asked what we all ask. Why we’re here. Don’t you wanna know what I did?”

Jonathan rubbed at his nose with his sleeve. He looked up at the clouds, black like coal smoke.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “It’s not my business.” The words came out sounding ruder and harsher than Jonathan had meant.

There was a low rumble of thunder. That and the muffled thuds of their feet kicking leather were the only sounds.

“Okay,” Jonathan finally said. “Why are you here?”

Walter smiled, his teeth shining whitely in the growing gloom.

“I thought you’d never ask!” He slapped his hands together. “Mother’s Day, man.”

“Mother’s Day?”

“Yeah. Check this out. Around the corner from our place is this shop that sells all this little fancy stuff. You know, gloves and watches and hats and stuff. It’s my mama’s favorite store. She’s in there, like, every day. And she’s always going on about this purse that’s in the window, right? One of a kind, it says, custom-made. This big ugly pink thing. And I know Mother’s Day is coming up. I don’t got any money, but I wanna get my mama something nice, you know? Now, there’s no chance of me affording it. And no chance of me just sticking it under my shirt, either, ’cause Mrs. Swanson who owns the place always has her stink eye glued to me whenever I’m in there. So the night before Mother’s Day, I break in.”

Jonathan stopped the ball with his foot and held it.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. There’s this high window in the alley, way at the back of the store, and I get on a garbage can and crawl up through it. Soon as I hit the floor, though, this alarm goes off. Crazy loud. And I freak out. But I run up to the front and I grab that purse and run to the back door, but I hear voices outside. So I go back to the window I came in through, right? And I manage to jump up and start to climb through, but then I freeze, halfway out.”

“Why?”

“Cops, man. I see their flashing lights at the end of the alley. Then I hear ’em. Behind me. In the store. And I’m sitting there, half out the window, with my rear end hanging in the store, and this ugly pink purse in my hands.”

“Oh, man! Did they handcuff you and everything?”

Walter’s smile stretched across his whole face.

“Nope. ’Cause they didn’t even catch me, man!”

“What? You ran away?”

“Uh-uh.” Walter shook his head. “I just hung there. And those cops walked all around that store with their flashlights. All they had to do was look up and they’d-a seen my scared butt dangling there in the air. But they never looked up, man. And nothing was broken. And the doors weren’t busted or nothing. And the cash register was just sitting there, full. So they thought it was a false alarm. I hung there in that window for half an hour and then they left.”

“No way.”

“Yeah, man. That’s the truth.”

“Then … why are you here?”

Walter shrugged and his smile faded.

“I guess it wasn’t, like, a super-smart crime. Seeing as how it was a one-of-a-kind purse from my mama’s favorite store and everything. Next time she went in, she was showing it off, bragging about how I’d saved up all my allowances to buy it for her. Of course, Mrs. Swanson knew I’d never bought it. So that was that. And here I am.” Walter shook his head, a small smile on his lips. “You shoulda seen her, though. The morning I gave it to her? You shoulda seen how happy and proud she was, man.”

Jonathan kicked the ball to him.

“So that’s my story, man. What’s yours? Why you here?”

Above them, a bolt of lightning stabbed across the sky. A sharp crack of thunder rattled the windows to the dining room. They both looked up.

“Come on,” Jonathan said. “Let’s go grab dinner.”

Over dinner the boys hardly spoke. Their letters were written in silence. Even Benny kept his snorting and gloating to a quiet minimum. Jonathan wrote his letter with a fast hand.

In bed, under the shifting light of the candles, he held the newest letter from his parents, the one that had arrived that morning on the supply boat. He breathed slow, even breaths, and read it again. When the other boys were ready, he opened Robinson Crusoe and began to read. He read to the very end, looking up from time to time into the ring of faces listening around the flames.

When he closed the finished book and blew out the candles, he went to sleep, with his parents’ letter lying open on the pillow beside his head.

When he blinked his eyes awake in the morning, the letter was still lying by his head.

But it was folded into a perfect, delicate crane.