She didn’t say anything more. Zeke nodded, and that was okay, he would have had trouble speaking just then and Alicia knew it. So he just picked up the canisters of salt and flour and followed her back to class.

  Zeke gave Mr. MacPherson the salt and the flour (“Wow,” he said at the amount of it all. “Good job, Zeke!”), and the teacher passed it out to anyone who needed it, which was nearly everyone. Turns out kids couldn’t resist eating dough, even if all it was flavored with was salt and flour.

  “Right, let’s just get through Antarctica,” Mr. MacPherson said, his patience wearing thin. “Because tomorrow, we’re going to start Europe.”

  Zeke had only just made it back to his desk when Mr. MacPherson said this. He stopped, motionless, halfway to sitting down.

  “Hey, Zeke!” Daniel said, as if he’d just noticed Zeke had left and come back. “We’re making Antarctica. What’s wrong?”

  Because Zeke was still frozen.

  Europe.

  They were going to talk about Europe.

  Europe meant countries.

  Countries meant France.

  And that was going to be excruciating.

  As promised, reader, the full story of France. It may seem implausible, but every word is true.

  France was a curse that should have been lifted generations ago, if there had been anyone who’d known how to. Some great-great-great-great- (or possibly great-great-great-great-great-) grandfather of Zeke’s had visited France on a ship—this was well before airplanes—and had acted so badly, so embarrassingly, that none of Zeke’s relatives would ever fully talk about it. France, at this late date, was equally embarrassed, but that didn’t solve the problem either.

  Zeke did know a few things, and there was other stuff you could look up in history books—which is why he dreaded it coming up in school. He’d been lucky so far. History for young ’uns was either all “America as the Greatest Thing Ever” or “Mummies Lived in Pyramids!”

  But now they were old enough to know there was such a thing as Europe. Zeke had known it was inevitable, but it felt like a punishment coming so soon after his victory over Ms. Pfister. He sat quietly on the bus later that day, thinking it over. Daniel and Alicia had always known, of course. And honestly, it’s not like you could have an entire country on your knee without there needing to be international treaties and meetings with governments now and then, so the school knew and, Zeke supposed, most of the students did, too. Pelicarnassus obviously did because he’d tried to invade.

  But, like Daniel and Alicia, they’d all known about it for a long time, long enough to first accept it as completely normal, then long enough to forget. When they started studying it, though, how was it going to be when the textbooks told them that Bartholomew Svensson, Zeke’s great-whatever-grandfather, had gotten—Zeke closed his eyes with shame—very inebriated on French wine, insulted the queen of France, thrown up all over her queenly French dress, and slurred, “I wouldn’t come back here to visit if you were on my own knee”?

  Never let it be said the French couldn’t be mischievous. A Harlequin in court cast a spell that moved the entire country. It was only supposed to be for a night, but the next day, no one could find the Harlequin to change it back, and no one else had any idea how to undo the spell. It was unclear who exactly had been cursed, the lizard or the French, but a permanent-seeming curse it turned out to be, to the dismay of both reptile and country.

  Ever since then, it had passed down from generation to generation: the Svenssons, who became the Bronsteins, who became the Townsends, which was Zeke’s last name. France appeared on the knee of the eldest male child on the death of each father. Which, as previously stated, Zeke (and France) thought was 1) kind of sexist and 2) kind of crappy when Zeke was the youngest to have to host them in the entire line.

  To be fair, it had benefits. They were very funny, the French. The cheese was excellent. And they seemed to have genuine affection for their host. Being on a lizard’s knee had become a tradition as much as Bastille Day. Plus, Zeke gathered it was good for tourism. You could visit a country that had previously neighbored France, step over the border they used to have, and—bam!—by some remnant of the original spell, you were on Zeke’s knee. Planes still had to fly in (the twice-daily ritual that Zeke’s grandfather had negotiated), shrinking down again as the spell took over, but mostly, France seemed to sort of love Zeke.

  Which, sometimes, felt like something wonderful.

  “You okay, buddy?” Daniel asked. “You haven’t said anything since we left.”

  “Yeah,” Zeke said, “I’m okay.”

  “Is it about France?”

  Zeke blinked, surprised. Daniel was usually never this observant. “Yeah.”

  “You could ask them again?” Daniel suggested, then leaned over to Zeke’s knee. “Hey, France! It’s about to get really awkward for Zeke if you stay on his knee!”

  “’Ello, Daniel!” cried back a little French voice. If the French loved Zeke, they adored Daniel. “We are sadly no closer to a solution! We will try to remain quiet, though, if it helps!” This was followed by a lot of shushing in French.

  Daniel looked at Zeke and shrugged.

  “There’s Miel,” Alicia said from across the aisle. The hawk was in his usual place, claws dug into the top of the first seat. “I’m going to go talk to him. Maybe he can help.”

  “I’ll come, too!” said Daniel, and followed her.

  Zeke stayed where he was. He watched them stagger up the aisle of the moving bus, grabbing on to the backs of seats to keep their balance. Zeke always found it bizarre that they were required by law to use seat belts in cars, but on a school bus, you were basically on an open, hard bench with nothing to hold you there, nothing to grab on to and, oh yeah, you could walk around. How was that even legal?

  “WHERE IS YOUR FRIEND ZEKE?” he heard.

  Alicia and Daniel were looking back at him now. Miel was waiting for an answer.

  Zeke sighed and slid out of his seat.

  “I MUST APOLOGIZE TO YOU!” Miel said when Zeke arrived. “I RUSHED OFF IN A VERY RUDE FASHION AT RECESS, ONE THAT DOES NOT BEFIT THE TYPE OF PERSON I WISH TO BE, NOR ACTIVELY TRY TO BE!”

  “You talk like an old grown-up,” Daniel said.

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Zeke said to Miel.

  “I DO, THOUGH IT IS KIND OF YOU TO SAY SO.” He thought for a moment. “KIND OR WEAK, I AM UNSURE, BUT SINCE I DO NOT KNOW YOU VERY WELL, I WILL ASSUME KIND UNTIL PROVEN OTHERWISE.”

  “Thanks?” Zeke said, unsure about this.

  “I WAS EMBARRASSED BY MY FALL!” the hawk shouted. “EVEN THOUGH IT WAS NOT YOUR FAULT, I CHOSE TO BE ANGRY AT YOU ANYWAY! THAT MAKES IT MY MISTAKE, NOT YOURS, AND I AM SORRY!”

  “Wow,” Alicia said, her hands over her ears, “your voice just stays really loud.”

  “I AM ALSO SORRY FOR THAT! NORMALLY, HAWKS DO NOT HAVE TO SPEAK THIS MUCH! THE FLYING AND THE KILLING MAKE ENOUGH OF AN IMPRESSION!”

  “I could see how they would,” Alicia said.

  “Thank you for apologizing,” Zeke said.

  “YOU ARE AN UNUSUAL PERSON!” Miel said to him. “THOUGH BLIND, I AM USUALLY ABLE TO TELL MUCH ABOUT SOMEONE FROM HOW THEY SPEAK, WHAT WORDS THEY CHOOSE, WHAT VOLUME—”

  “So you know what volume is, then,” Alicia said, still plugging her ears.

  “AND ALSO HOW THEY SMELL, THEIR SILENCES, THEIR WAY OF CARRYING THEM-SELVES IN THE WORLD!” Miel turned to Zeke from the seat top, as if looking at him through the still-cracked sunglasses. “BUT SO FAR, I CANNOT TELL ABOUT YOU, ZEKE THE LIZARD!”

  “What can’t you tell?” Zeke asked, a little horrified and embarrassed, if the truth be told (and it will be told here, always).

  “WHO YOU ARE! YOU ARE A MYSTERY! ARE YOU KIND OR WEAK? BRAVE OR PASSIVE? WISE OR AFRAID?”

  Zeke didn’t know how to respond to this. “I think I’m—”

  “NO, NO! IT IS CLEAR YOU DO NOT KNOW EITHER YET. IT WILL BE INTERESTING TO SEE WHAT THE ANSWERS ARE. THIS IS MY STOP!”

  With no pause, Miel hopped down onto the seat. “THANK YOU, SHREW!” he called to the bus driver, then hopped out the door, where his terrifying-looking father was waiting for him again with a hug.

  The three lizards watched him go as the bus carried on down the road.

  Alicia said as they went, “Can’t you be both wise and afraid?”

  Daniel said, “We forgot to ask him about France.”

  At their cul-de-sac, Zeke said goodbye to Alicia and Daniel and walked the last stretch to his house alone.

  One of the Normans was waiting on his lawn.

  “What do you want?” Zeke asked, stopping on his driveway.

  The Norman—Zeke didn’t know which one it was; in fact, he wondered if the Normans themselves always knew—ruffled his egret wings, rearranged his hat, and just generally looked both hostile and embarrassed, which seemed a weird combination.

  “Stupid lizard,” the Norman said.

  Zeke immediately took four forceful steps onto the lawn. “Get out of here. Get off my lawn. Get out of my neighborhood!”

  The Norman squawked in surprise—Zeke was a big monitor lizard, don’t forget, and this Norman didn’t have the protection of the other Norman or Pelicarnassus—and flew to the top of a dying cherry tree that Zeke’s mom was always meaning to cut down. “You ruined everything,” the Norman complained from his perch.

  “What?” Zeke said, baffled. “I didn’t ruin anything.”

  “You’re all he ever talks about now!”

  “Who?”

  “It used to be just us, me and Norman and Pelicarnassus. But now, it’s all ‘How are we going to take revenge on the lizard? How are we going to make the lizard pay for what’s he done?’”

  “I haven’t done anything to anybody!”

  “You punched him!”

  “Oh,” Zeke said, because he kept forgetting that part. “Yeah, I guess I did.” Then he grew angry again. “But I apologized and I didn’t get him in trouble for wrecking my bedroom window. I’ve barely even spoken to him before now!”

  “He thinks you’re some kind of hero!” Norman shouted, opening his wings in anger.

  “Trust me,” Zeke said, “I’m not a hero.”

  “Well, you’d better hope you’re wrong. Because he’s taking the whole school tomorrow. And he’s coming for you.”

  “What do you mean, taking the whole school?”

  “You think someone who can invade France can’t manage a school?”

  “His mom won’t let him.”

  “She won’t know about it until it’s too late.” Norman walked to the edge of a branch so it bent down to Zeke’s face. “Too late for you.”

  “This is stupid. I don’t want any of this.”

  “Doesn’t matter what you want. You got it.”

  Zeke’s face went hard. This feeling was far too familiar. He got a lot of things he didn’t want. The black dog. France. And now Pelicarnassus. When was it supposed to stop?

  “Wait a minute,” Zeke said. “Why are you telling me?”

  Norman stomped between a couple of branches, clearly annoyed with himself and maybe every single thing that had ever happened in his short little life. It was a good stomp for such a skinny bird.

  “I DON’T KNOW!” he finally shouted. “Just . . . I’m sick of you being the focus. I’m sick of you being all we ever talk about.”

  “But if he captures me tomorrow and does whatever, won’t that mean it’s over? You can go back to whatever you did as friends before?”

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  Norman turned his head to one side and looked Zeke in the eye for the first time. “It’s really bad, Zeke. It’s really, really bad.”

  “What he’s going to do?”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t come to school tomorrow. Or ever.”

  “But what is it?”

  “I’ve said too much already,” said Norman. “I shouldn’t even be here.”

  And off he flew, leaving Zeke behind with a zillion unanswered questions and no one to ask them to.

  “Hello?” Zeke said as he came inside. “Mom?”

  It was quiet. No one in the living room or the kitchen, so without even setting down his backpack, he walked to his mom’s bedroom door and knocked softly. “Mom?”

  Inside, he heard the black dog whimper, which was somehow ten times scarier than when it barked. He pushed open the door. The black dog padded over from the bedside and licked Zeke’s hand. This made no sense at all. The black dog had never been friendly, never asked for anything, just stood between Zeke and his mother like a bad-tempered bodyguard. Even when the dog was gone—which was now and then—Zeke still felt it was somehow still observing him, making sure he was on his best behavior.

  The dog whimpered again, then padded back over to the bedside. Zeke, afraid and not feeling at all wise, followed it. “Mom?” he said, almost whispering it.

  He took her hand.

  “Mom?”

  “She’s going to be okay, Zeke,” Alicia’s mom said for what felt like the hundredth time. “I need you to hear me when I say that.”

  “I hear you,” Zeke said, though it didn’t sound very convincing, even to him.

  “She just needs some rest.” Alicia’s mom put her hands on Zeke’s shoulders. She had to reach up to do so, even though Zeke was just a kid.

  “What happened to her?” Zeke asked, though he felt like maybe he didn’t really want to know.

  “Mostly, she forgot to eat.”

  “She does that sometimes. When she can’t get out of bed. I usually bring her something.”

  “I know. But this time it made her pass out before you got home.”

  Zeke nodded, then he asked, “Why does this stuff happen to her?”

  Alicia’s mom sighed and sat back in her chair. Zeke knew how important this conversation was because Alicia wasn’t there. It was just Zeke and her mother—who had a name, who had a last name that Zeke could have added Ms. to and called her that, but for his entire life, he had only been able to think of her as “Alicia’s Mom”—in their little kitchenette that Alicia’s mom kept about a hundred times cleaner than Zeke’s mom did theirs.

  “Sometimes people carry heavy burdens,” she told him now. “Burdens the rest of us can’t really see. We just see the person struggling to carry them, and it’s hard to find the right way to help them.”

  “I would carry it for her,” Zeke said.

  Alicia’s mom got choked up at this but tried not to let Zeke see. “I know you would, Zeke. But that’s not how it works, I’m afraid.”

  Zeke looked down at the floor of the kitchenette. The pattern was interlocking diamonds and had been there for all of Zeke’s life, so long he never even really noticed it anymore. He imagined being as small as one of those diamonds and just living down there, maybe hopping from diamond to diamond with your diamond friends and nothing ever went wrong and no one ever bothered you and your mom was always okay and there were no pelicans who were going to take over the entire school just so they could get revenge for something you didn’t even know why you did.

  “So what happens now?” he asked.

  “Well, she’s in the hospital,” said Alicia’s mom, “and they’re going to help her. There are things she can do and medicines she can take and she’s told us, she’s told me how much she wants to do those things. To get better. To get better for you.”

  “Will it make the black dog go away?”

  Alicia’s mom sighed again. She was doing that a lot today. “I’m not sure it will ever actually go away,” she said. “But maybe you won’t see it so often and other times, well, maybe there are ways to live with it, ways where she can still be happy, and you can be happy.”

  “I’m having a really bad day,” Zeke said. “I wish my dad was here.”

  Zeke never talked much about his dad, not out loud, not to anyone. He had died five years ago—not from an accident or by being mistaken for prey (which still happened now and then)—but from a heart issue everyone said he could live a long time with. Except he didn’t. He was just there one day, then the next he wasn’t.

  He had been big like Zeke, an exceptionally tall lizard. Zeke didn’t remember much else about him except that he didn’t think his dad was especially kind or especially mean, especially smart or especially dumb. He had no talents like singing or dancing or sports that Zeke could remember. He was just a decent lizard who was Zeke’s dad and now he was gone and Zeke wished more than anything that he wasn’t.

  “I know,” said Alicia’s mom. “But I want you to know this, Zeke—this is really important. Your mom loves you. More than anything in the world. And what she’d want you to know is that you’re safe, okay? You’re safe here with us, until she’s ready to come home. All right?”

  Zeke nodded, because he couldn’t quite speak. The truth would be that he was crying, but maybe we don’t need to look too closely just now, maybe he deserves a little distance. Alicia’s mom is right, he does need to be safe, so the door closes and Zeke is behind it, allowed to feel whatever he needs to feel.

  Zeke sat down in his usual seat on the school bus the next morning, on the aisle so Daniel could look out the window. But today, instead of sitting across from or behind them like she usually did, Alicia motioned for Zeke to scoot over and squeezed in next to him. He didn’t ask her why, and she didn’t explain. They sat there, three lizards, not very big at all in the scheme of things, the largest in the middle, the two smaller ones on either side, doing their best to make him feel protected.

  There was a thump, and the three lizards looked up. Miel was on top of the seat in front of them, instead of his usual place up front. He didn’t say anything either, just turned to face the front of the bus, as if this was where he sat every morning.