The door of August’s room slammed behind him as he charged toward his splintered desk. Hastily he yanked open and rummaged through the drawers. Not there. He scanned the Formica-topped table, where the skeleton circus stood assembled. Not there either. He pushed aside the stuff from which the grinning performers were built: coat hangers, vintage newspapers, a large jar of Ping-Pong balls. Nope, nothing.

“Shoot!” cried August in frustration. “Now, where did I leave it?”

He cast about frantically, extending his search across the entire garret. A garret (in case you didn’t know, and why would you because you probably don’t live in one?) is a cramped sort of room huddled beneath a building’s roof. It’s the sort of dismal lodging preferred by bedraggled painters and poets who wallow in the gloom, supping thin porridge and creating “important” art.

And while this may sound a bit depressing, the garret suited August just fine. He had, in fact, only recently claimed the space as his own, abandoning a much grander room with a fireplace on the first floor. It was true that the raw beams made for constant ducking and skull thumping. And indeed, much of the space was occupied by balding leather trunks, towers of musty storage boxes, and discarded household objects, including an old ironing board and a keyless piano. But the room had one unique and beneficial feature: it could be accessed only by a narrow staircase that Hydrangea’s expansive skirts could not pass.

And so, above the realm of his aunt’s rules and barricades, August was able to glimpse the world outside from two small, unboarded windows that pierced the roof at front and back.

From this lofty outlook, the vista seemed vast and fascinating. But in truth the house inhabited a quiet, forgotten corner of the county. Indeed, the dirt road ended at Locust Hole, giving few people reason to venture there. Occasionally an intrepid tourist, the kind who travels alone in comfortable shoes, might set up his fancy camera on a tripod to take atmospheric pictures. Beyond that, the grocer’s delivery boy, the mailman, and the critters of field and swamp provided the only comings and goings there were to observe.

Until recently.

“There you are!” exclaimed August with relief. A pile of empty Mudd Pie wrappers (August had a particular fondness for the cookie snacks) lay discarded near the wastebasket. Beneath these, August retrieved the object of his search: a telescope. He snatched it up, dashed to the rear window, opened it, and placed the smaller end of the instrument to his eye.

Through the age-speckled lens he first scanned the field behind the house: a sorry, spartan stretch of dirt sprouting withered, wilting pepper plants. At its far end he located the crooked frame of the ruined gazebo, where long-ago DuPonts had dined alfresco on long-ago balmy evenings.

Beyond that lay the narrow canal. And there in the muddy water, rocking gently, was the most recent addition to August’s small world. It had arrived without notice a few weeks prior, moored by someone in the dead of night. It was a houseboat.

Although, houseboat might be a generous description. It was, in fact, little more than a large shed roped to a wooden pallet, buoyed up by a pontoon formed from old oil drums. A rusting contraption with pipes and dials sat on “deck.” This, August concluded, must be the generator by which the floating home was lit and powered.

The houseboat seemed perilously pitched, one end weighted down beneath a tired-looking outboard motor. August did not believe the ramshackle vessel looked seaworthy.

He was, however, greatly intrigued by a crudely painted sign nailed to its wall. Garish colors had faded to shadows, but August could just make out the words “Madame Marvell, Ball Gazing, Magic + More.”

He wasn’t exactly sure who Madame Marvell was. In the days since the houseboat’s mysterious arrival, August had observed only one crew member with his telescope: a scrawny barefoot girl with a tangle of unbrushed hair. She spent her days grubbing about the canal bank collecting frogs in a colander, filling the generator from a spouted can, and dozing facedown, limbs loose like an unstrung puppet in the branches of nearby trees.

The girl seemed so entirely at ease in the untamed landscape, so like a creature of nature, that August had begun to think of her as an untamed thing. Wild. He suspected that this wild child was not the Madame Marvell mentioned on the sign. But without another person around to claim the name, he had attached it to the girl, and somehow it seemed to fit.

At that moment, August spotted her scrambling onto her floating home, one arm cradling her colander, the other a bunch of freshly plucked iris.

“We’re both running late, Madame,” August muttered. “Hurry now; it started five minutes ago!” He swiveled his telescope just a tad, following the girl as she passed inside. “No! NO!” he cried in anguish as the flowers were dumped into a pitcher at the houseboat’s window, blocking his view.

But a sigh of relief followed as the flower arrangement was moved, revealing beyond it a small, boxy, old-fashioned television. And, as the screen flooded with static, then color and life, the hairs on August’s arm tingled, and his heart jolted with the thrill of excitement.

You see, while the houseboat and its inhabitant had enlivened August’s sleepy landscape, this scuffed-up TV, with its plastic knobs and crooked rabbit-ear antenna, had changed August’s life!