I think Auntie told everyone to pretend not to notice my head, because when I get home that is what they all do. Pretend.

“Hello, Octobia May. Certainly a nice day we’re having, isn’t it?” Mrs. Ruby has cataracts, but her eyes follow my head like a searchlight.

Mr. Piers sits at the organ, running his fingers over the keys. “Octobia May. Would you like a lesson? I’m ready. And today it’s free.”

I sit down beside him. For two hours, we practice “Unforgettable,” a song by Mr. Nat King Cole. And other songs that sound better on a piano.

Feeling the keys is like touching my scalp. Smooth. I make lots of mistakes. And wonder. Is good and evil like piano or organ keys? Sitting side by side. Making it easy for people to mistake one for the other.

Mrs. Loewenthal comes into the room wearing a wide smile on her face. Asking if I’d like to play gin rummy. It’s Jonah who rescues me. Walking into our house, Jonah sets a brown bag on my lap — with a wig inside. “To cover my mistake, Octobia May.”

I hurry him outside. Explaining that I do not want a wig. But I could use his help, following Mr. Davenport wherever he goes on Sunday. I thought it up on the way home from the graveyard. If Jonah goes, we will be even Steven. “And get to save your cousin, too.”

Jonah folds the bag over and frets. He is in his mother’s good graces, these days. And wants to stay that way, he says. But he is a good friend and cousin. So he agrees to meet me here tomorrow night. But only after I ask how he would feel if his cousin got bit and turned all his relatives into red-eyed, blood-sucking vampires.

I look over the railing into the bushes, hoping no one will ever find the letter I hid in there. Then off to the wooden shed we go, pulling out an old bicycle Auntie saved from the rubbish pile. He follows me up and down the block and around the corner when I ride. I do the same for him. Until I see Mr. Buster. His yellow tie matches his yellow shoes, which make his short, skinny feet look like bananas.

Leaving my bike on the pavement, I follow Mr. Buster up our porch steps. “Why you dressed up?”

“Just interviewed. Start tomorrow. First thing. Thank God people still dying.”

Jonah stands on the pavement eating raspberries. “What they gonna have you doing, Mr. Buster?”

He looks up and down the street like he has a secret to tell us. “I’ll be dressing the bodies.”

Jonah frowns. “Putting on shoes and pants and slips?”

“Boxers, too?” I want to know.

He doesn’t know all the particulars, he says. “Gonna do what they tell me, even if it means putting wigs on heads or cutting toenails with my teeth.”

Jonah ducks when Auntie finds her way to the sitting room window. Sitting on the sofa, she talks to us through the screen. She asks Mr. Buster if this is what will happen, him talking work at night while we eat. Telling us what color socks the man around the corner wore into the grave.

He thinks everything she says is funny, so he laughs. “I am a man who is used to working, day and night.” He picks up Juppie, who is trying to get to me. “So even if I have to be the box they lay the body in, I’ll do it. Work is good for the soul.”

He ignores me for a while and only talks to Auntie. Jonah stays hidden behind the bushes. When Mr. Buster asks Auntie to the movies, she blushes when she says she couldn’t possibly. Then she heads for the kitchen.

Mr. Buster pinches my nose. “ ’Case nobody said it. Your crown and glory look beautiful to me.”

I pat my head. “For a minute,” I say, hugging my knees, “I forgot I didn’t have any hair.” Sitting closer to him, I whisper, “Do you know where I can buy a stake, Mr. Buster?”

Laughing, Mr. Buster says, “Well, I do not.”

Jonah heads across the street to Bessie’s house. Juppie follows behind him with her head up high. When Bessie’s father walks onto the porch, he waves her inside. Stopping, he stares at me a while before he goes in the house.

Maybe it’s the disappointment on my face that makes Mr. Buster stand up. “But follow me.” His yellow shoes tap the steps and walk over the grass Auntie mows every other Thursday. And into our rigidity wooden shed.

I am thinking about Mr. Davenport when I say, “Stakes are the only true way to kill a vampire.”

Mr. Buster picks over rusty nails and hammers. A broken axhammer and lightbulb. “Can’t say if you right about how to handle vampires. But just in case I need you to save me from one — colored or not — I’ll lend you this.” He laughs when he taking a broken flat-tip screwdriver out of his toolbox. I walk back to the house with it tucked in my socks. “A vampire killer sleeping right upstairs from me,” he says. “I feel safer already.”

Auntie is on the porch when we get back. Leaning over the railing, she calls for Jonah, who is now marching up the street like a soldier. The fishing rod he carries on his shoulder is the rifle he’s taking to war, he tells Auntie. “To kill those communists.”

Henry is walking beside him, not Bessie. “No,” Henry says. “We’re playing cowboys and Indians.” He aims a pole at me. “Pow.” Laughing, he says, “Look. I scalped her.”

Jonah and Henry march up our cobblestone street. Auntie looks me over, staring extra long at my head. Mr. Buster winks at her and goes inside. “Jonah. I need to talk to you.”

“It’s only hair,” I tell Auntie. “It’ll grow back.” I begged her not to tell Jonah’s mother what he did to my hair the other day. I wanted him to perm it. Besides, there’s nothing his mother can do to him that will bring my hair back. I say this again to Auntie, squeezing her tight around the middle. Reminding her about the time she wanted the wind to catch her.

She rubs my bald head. “Children just plain foolish.”

By the time Jonah sets foot on our pavement, Auntie has changed her mind. She tells him to get along to his fishing and to bring her back a few catfish if he comes across them. He smiles. “Look, Octobia May. My winnings bought me friends.” Running after Henry, he says for him to wait up. Not that Henry does.

Auntie walks into the house and comes back with a baby brush and a cup of olive oil sprinkled with jasmine grown in our yard. Oiling my scalp, she sings the song my mother sang to me when I was sick in the hospital right after I was born — and then two years ago.

I was born with my heart outside of my chest. The doctors put it back in the right place, but every once in a while it gives me trouble. “Your heart quit beating twice that last time,” Aunt Shuma reminds me. “For ten minutes,” we both say.

The doctors say that it isn’t possible, but I heard my family singing while I was dead. Their song snuck up the hall and opened the operating room door. It leaked into the anesthesia, dripping into me like new blood. When I woke up from being dead, I was singing that song.