What the—? But before I could finish the thought, our broken living room window became shrouded in a red flutter.

  Something rolled off the roof into the fluttering fabric, with a clumsy-sounding Oof, as it hit the lawn. That was how we knew it wasn’t a something, but a someone.

  Roxy and I pulled open the door, which was almost off its hinges, and were met by a sight even stranger than the minivan in the living room. A lump bobbed and bumbled beneath the slick red fabric, like a rat under a rug. Finally the lump emerged. Beady eyes in a rodential face. Marvin McSchultz.

  “Wow!” said Marvin, more hyped-up than I’d ever seen him. “Wow! That was great!” He struggled to free himself from his parachute harness. “It pulled me off the ground, spun me higher than the clouds. Heck, I thought I was on my way to Oz! But then it just dropped me down the middle! I was spinning, I was tumbling, then I pulled the rip cord, the chute came out, and suddenly I’m floating while the whole world’s spinning all around me. It’s true what they say—there’s no wind in the middle of a tornado. Everything’s nice and still. A’course I had to pull on these here steering ropes, to keep myself right in the middle. It was just like you said: the twister didn’t hurt me, because I did the incantation, just like you told me, Hula-Hoop and all!” His eyes were wide with excitement. His hair, which was usually a greasy bowl on his head, was teased into wild tornado-twisted tufts. Then I noticed that in one hand, he clutched the brown paper bag we had sold him—making sure to keep it closed.

  “Thanks, you guys,” he said, shaking my hand so hard it almost pulled my arm right out of its socket. “You changed my life! Thanks for selling me this fantastic bag of wind!”

  Roxanne’s jaw had dropped so low, I thought it might fall off completely. “But…,” she began. “But it can’t be! We made up the whole—”

  I closed my hand over her mouth so quickly, it made a popping sound, but it succeeded in shutting her up. “Sold it?” I said to Marvin, keeping completely calm. “We didn’t sell it to you—we rented it to you.”

  The smile began to drain from Marvin’s red-cheeked face. “What?”

  “You don’t think we’d part with something like that for a mere twelve dollars, do you?”

  Roxanne pulled my hand from her mouth and caught on, falling in stride with me. “That’s right,” she said. “You paid us the one-time usage fee, and now the bag comes back to us.”

  Marvin pursed his lips and tried to tame his wild hair. “No fair!” he said.

  “Of course, we could go to the police and tell them who’s responsible for all the storm damage,” I said.

  “Or we could keep it to ourselves,” said Roxy.

  Finally Marvin caved. “Fine,” he said, handing over the bag. “Be that way.” And he turned and left, dragging his parachute behind him.

  When he was gone, we looked at the bag for a very long time. We put our ears up to it, and heard… nothing.

  “What do you think?” I asked Roxanne.

  “I don’t know. What was that incantation you told him?”

  “Owah… Tanass… Siam…”

  Roxanne raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “Go figure.” Then she turned and went back into our wind-blasted house in search of a broom, dustpan, and hydraulic winch, so she could clean up. As for me, I went straight down to the basement on a mission.

  All things considered, I suppose there really are stranger things in heaven and on earth than we dare imagine. Maybe even stranger than Roxanne and me. Now if I can only find that Hula-Hoop…

  The In Crowd

  Alana was a boomerang, flying through her sixth foster home, doing maximum damage, and then heading right back to Harmony Home—the institution where she had spent most of her life. Although they euphemistically called it a “group home,” that didn’t change the fact that it was an orphanage. At sixteen, she was one of the oldest there. And although she could petition to be emancipated, she didn’t do it. Because where would she go?

  “Why, Alana?” the therapist would ask. “Why is it always the same with you?”

  Alana could not—would not—look her in the eye. She could hear the stabbing anger and accusations in the woman’s voice. She didn’t have to see them in her face as well.

  “The DiGiorgios are good people—but you just had to lose your temper, didn’t you? You couldn’t control it just this once. Didn’t you even try?”

  The fact was, Alana had tried. She had tried for three whole weeks, accepting the pitying way her new foster parents spoke to her. Enduring all those overly kind, bend-over-backward sort of gestures. She lived with the way they whispered about her at night, as if she was a pet that had to be house-trained, and she pretended to “belong,” when all the while she felt outside of their double-paned windows, even though she stood inside their house. Then that morning, she just snapped. She couldn’t say what caused her rage, but when it was over, everything that could break in the DiGiorgio household had been broken. The gentle couple wasn’t too gentle when they hauled her back to Harmony Home and washed their hands of her.

  “You’re like a land mine,” said the therapist. “Someone treads too close to you, and you detonate.”

  Still not looking up, Alana heaved a shrug. “I guess I push people away.”

  The therapist gave a bitter guffaw. “That’s putting it mildly.”

  * * *

  Dinner in the cafeteria. Silly gossip, petty cliques scheming against one another. Kids either preening, posturing, or fighting. It was like any other prison—and Alana had come to think of Harmony Home as a place of incarceration, for although the halls and grounds of the old converted mansion were more inviting than some other group homes, that didn’t change its nature. She and at least a hundred others lived in its overcrowded rooms, went to school there, suffered through adolescence there. Now, as she sat with her regular friends, it felt as if she hadn’t been gone for a month. It was as if she had never left—and that wasn’t a good feeling.

  “So, I guess you haven’t met the new boy,” Justine said over dinner.

  “Of course she hasn’t met him,” said Missy. “She hasn’t been here to meet him.” Missy and Justine were permanent fixtures at Harmony Home. For whatever reason, the powers that be had deemed them unplaceable. Alana could never understand what made her friends even less placeable than herself, and she never asked because she really didn’t want to know.

  “I don’t care about any ‘new boy,’ ” Alana told them. She had seen her share of new boys come into Harmony Home, and they were nothing to shout about. Too many of them treated girls with contempt and disrespect—and they were always angling for the One Thing. Alana wanted nothing to do with them. “Not interested,” she said, trying to shut it down.

  “But this boy’s different,” insisted Justine.

  “And he’s good-looking,” added Missy.

  “And he’s smart, too,” offered Justine.

  Alana gave her dry pork chop a decent burial beneath her mashed potatoes.

  “But he’s messed up,” said Missy. “I mean, he doesn’t seem messed up, but…” Then she leaned in close enough for her hair to dangle into the motley mess of Alana’s tray. “They say he killed his family.”

  “Not just his family,” added Missy, “but his entire neighborhood.”

  * * *

  There was a windstorm that night. The kind that blew hot through the canyons, rattling windows, uprooting trees, and tearing up the roof. Alana could hear those orphaned shingles bouncing helplessly above her. When she was younger, she would hear the shingles and tar paper scraping past, and would think the sky was falling. She heard the phantom sounds of the wind in her dreams that night, jolting awake to flashes of heat lightning. Then, when morning came, she awoke to find herself alone in the oversized bedroom she shared with five other girls—Justine and Missy included.

  “Rise and shine,” said Ms. Zabel, the housemother assigned to their wing—but as she stepped into the room, there was only Alana to coax out of bed.

  “Where are the others?” Ms. Zabel asked.

  “Beats me.”

  Alana quickly dressed, figuring she would meet her friends at breakfast. Maybe they were waking up earlier these days. But they weren’t at breakfast. In fact, a good dozen kids didn’t show up for breakfast that day, and through Alana’s classes, the empty seats screamed out in their silence. Every corner of the grounds was searched, from the furnace-blackened basement to the old storm cellar by the edge of the woods. All searches came up dry—but rumors ran rampant. According to what Alana had overheard from the teachers, the kids had conspired to run away—in fact, they had been planning it for weeks—and since teen conspiracy theories were big among the adults who ran Harmony Home, everyone figured that was what happened. Authorities were notified, and it was left in the hands of the police. Alana had to admit they were probably right. She had run off with various groups of friends many times before. But her boomerang spirit always brought her back. Perhaps Justine and Missy would be the same. Still, it troubled her that they hadn’t told her what they were up to.

  It was that afternoon, when she passed one of the private bedrooms reserved for special cases, that she heard someone crying. Alana stood outside the unlabeled door, listening for a full five minutes to a boy whose sobs sounded so agonizingly genuine that Alana wanted to cry as well. The sobbing didn’t stop. It was as if his grief knew no bottom. An endless well of sorrow. What could possibly make someone cry like that?

  Alana never looked into the room, but she instinctively knew that this was the new boy.

  * * *

  “You don’t look so smart.”

  For Alana, first contacts were more like pokes with a stick, but at least it got his attention. It was two days later. The afternoon was bright and clear, and those who didn’t have some trouble to tend to were out in the rec yard after classes. Alana found him sitting against a tree, alone, watching some other kids shoot some particularly brutal hoops.

  “Who said I was smart?” he said, only throwing her the slightest of glances.

  Alana stood above him, arms folded. “My friends did. Missy and Justine.”

  “Oh. Them.”

  “Don’t you want to know my name?” prompted Alana.

  “You’d be better off if I didn’t.”

  “It’s Alana. An A at the beginning, middle, and end.”

  The boy stood up, but not to greet her. Instead he turned his back to her, putting more of his attention onto the basketball game he was watching. It annoyed Alana to no end, but she fought the urge to say something rude.

  “If you’re so interested in the game, why don’t you go play?”

  The boy took a few moments before answering. “I don’t know any of those guys.”

  Alana snickered. “How long have you been here? Weeks, right? And you don’t know any of them?”

  “Nope.”

  “What are you, the kind of guy who doesn’t have friends?”

  He turned to her sharply, stung by her words. “I have friends. They’re just not here right now. That’s all. Okay?”

  Finally Alana understood. “So the friends you made here all ran away the other day, huh? Is that why you were crying?”

  His expression hardened. He became guarded. Suspicious. But he didn’t deny that those tears had been his.

  “There can’t be anything so bad that you have to cry like that,” said Alana. “I don’t even cry like that, and believe me, I’ve got plenty of reasons to.”

  He regarded her, stone-faced. It was strange—she felt as if his eyes were somehow invading her. Picking her like a lock.

  “Anyway,” continued Alana, “someone’ll catch those guys that left and bring them back, so you won’t be friendless for long.”

  He continued to regard her with that lock-picking gaze, and Alana refused to look away. If he was trying to intimidate her, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. That was when he said something that chilled her in spite of the heat of the day.

  “They’re never coming back,” he said, speaking so matter-of-factly it was all the more disturbing. “And if you’re not careful, you won’t be coming back either.”

  Alana felt anger rising to her face in a bright red flush. “Are you threatening me?”

  “Not a threat,” he said. “But a warning.”

  * * *

  His name was Garrett. Garrett LeBlanc. Although Alana didn’t believe what Justine and Missy said about what he had done, they were right about him being different. He didn’t hang around with the other kids, and although Harmony Home was famous for its loners, he wasn’t like the others. Most loners insisted on distance, and usually got it. No one much cared that they kept to themselves. They’d sit alone at a table, or wander off to a quiet corner, and they’d be out of sight, out of mind. But Garrett was never out of mind. When he was in a room, you could feel him there. You could feel his eyes boring into you, even when he was looking in the opposite direction. And it wasn’t just Alana—other kids could feel it too. Too many conversations seemed to be about Garrett. Who was he? Why was he here? Why, once you started thinking about him, couldn’t you get him out of your mind?

  Garrett was right about one thing: those other kids didn’t come back. Not one of them. They had made their escape. With Alana’s closest friends gone, Garrett became a project for her. She would systematically break down his layers of defenses and find out what made him tick. And then she would find out if any of the dark rumors about him were true.

  Day after day she forced herself to treat him decently, which proved to be a chore. Even though he excelled at ignoring people, she would talk to him until finally the cold reception he always gave her heated to lukewarm.

  On a rainy Saturday she found him in the Multiuseless Room, which was really called the Multipurpose Room, but most of the kids had concluded that it served no practical purpose. In an attempt to “socialize” him, Garrett had been taken from his secluded little bedroom and forced to share a larger room with five other boys. Apparently, it hadn’t worked. Garrett was sitting alone playing solitaire.

  Alana slid in across from him, pushed all the cards together, and began to shuffle them.

  “I was winning,” complained Garrett. “What are you doing?”

  “No one wins at solitaire,” she told him, “because even when you do, you just end up dealing the cards again until you get even more bored. You play blackjack?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll teach you, so we can run away together and take Las Vegas for millions.” He just stared at her again with that lock-picking gaze. Alana ignored it and continued to shuffle. When she heard the Ping-Pong ball behind her stop bouncing, she looked up to notice that most everyone else in the room was looking at them. Perhaps because no one had kept Garrett this close to them for this long. It was a grand victory for a girl who was famous for pushing people away, and she was happy to flaunt that in front of everyone.

  “You get dealt two cards. Dealer has to hit to seventeen. You don’t.”

  “This is twenty-one. I know how to play this.”

  “Good for you.” She dealt him his first card. A one-eyed jack. Alana always found one-eyed jacks mysterious. Like Garrett.

  “You know,” she offered, “if you ever feel like talking about stuff with someone who doesn’t have a PhD at the end of their name, I’m sure I can find the time in my busy schedule.”

  Garrett leaned away from the cards, obviously realizing this was just another ruse to get inside his head. “Suddenly I don’t feel like playing,” he said, then stood up and breezed out of the room. Alana tossed the deck on the table and followed closely in his wake, undaunted. In a way, he was like a game of solitaire himself. Alana’s game, and she was determined to deal again and again.

  “Don’t you know when to quit?”

  “No,” answered Alana. “That’s why I’m stuck in this place. How about you?”

  She followed him up the stairs and through the door to the roof, which was supposed to be alarmed but never was. The roof was strewn with dead leaves and other debris, waterlogging in the rain. If Garrett thought coming to this uninviting spot would deter Alana, he was wrong. In fact, she decided to call his bluff in a major way. The door to the roof didn’t close all the way unless you really closed it tightly, which was exactly what Alana did. Until someone noticed, they were locked up there. Garrett had no way out—no path away from her. Fine, she told herself. If he wants to be out on the roof in the rain, he will be. For a good long time.

  “Oh, that was just brilliant,” snapped Garrett.

  There was a warped plywood shelter in the corner built to protect a bird hutch—but like so many residents of Harmony Home, the pigeons had flown the coop years ago, and the hutch had been scavenged for various arts and crafts projects. It was there, beneath the low shelter, that Garrett and Alana waited out the rain.

  He could just scream like hell until someone came up here to let us in, thought Alana, but he’s not doing that. Perhaps he isn’t as anxious to be free of me as he seems. Knowing that made Alana even more bold. They sat watching the torrents pummel the roof.

  “What really happened to your family?” Alana asked. “I promise I won’t hate you—whatever you tell me.”

  Garrett laughed. It wasn’t the response Alana expected. Anger, maybe, but she didn’t expect to be laughed at. He brought up his knees, to tie his drenched laces. “I didn’t kill them, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Alana tried not to show her relief, but she knew it could be read in her body language. “That’s good,” she said, which she thought might have been the dumbest thing she had ever uttered in her life.

  But Garrett didn’t laugh again. He kept his eyes focused on his own shoes. “Do you ever get… close to people?” asked Garrett. “So close that you can’t let them go, no matter how hard you try?”