In the mirror his legs are too short, his chin too weak; his feet embarrass him. Maybe in some distant, glittering city, he would belong. Maybe in one of those places, he could emerge, bright and new, as the man he wishes he could become.

Some days, walking to school, or simply rising from bed, he is knocked off-balance by a sudden, stomach-churning sense of spectators ringed around him, their shirts soaked in blood and accusation on their faces. Pansy, they say, and level their outstretched fingers at him. Sissy. Fruit Punch.

* * *

Zeno is sixteen and apprenticing part-time in the machine shop at Ansley Tie and Lumber when seventy-five thousand soldiers in the North Korean People’s Army cross the 38th parallel and start the Korean War. By August the churchmen who gather around Mrs. Boydstun’s table on Sunday afternoons are complaining about the shortcomings of the new generation of American soldiers, how they’ve become pampered, made weak by an overindulgent culture, infected with give-up-itis, and the lit ends of their cigarettes draw orange circles above the chicken.

“Not brave like your daddy,” Pastor White says, and makes a show of slapping Zeno’s shoulder, and somewhere in the distance Zeno hears a door slide open.

Korea: a small green thumb on the schoolhouse globe. It looks about as far from Idaho as a person can get.

Every evening, after his shift at the mill, he runs partway around the lake. Three miles to the turn at West Side Road, three miles back, splashing through the rain, Athena—white-muzzled now, lionhearted—limping behind. Some nights, the sleek and shining warriors of Atlantis keep pace beside him as though drawn along hot wires, and he runs harder, trying to leave them behind.

* * *

The day he turns seventeen, he asks Mrs. Boydstun to let him drive the old Buick to Boise. She lights a new cigarette from her old one. The cuckoo clock ticks; her throngs of children stand on their shelves; three different Jesuses stare down from three different crosses. Over her shoulder, out the kitchen window, Athena curls up beneath the hedges. A mile away mice drowse inside the cabin where he and Papa spent their first Lakeport winter. The heart heals but never completely.

On the switchbacks down the canyon he gets carsick twice. At the recruitment office, a medic presses the cold cup of a stethoscope to his sternum, licks the tip of a pencil, and checks every box on the form. Fifteen minutes later he’s Private E-1 Zeno Ninis.

Seymour

Bunny owns the double-wide free and clear, but Pawpaw still had a loan on the acre: $558 a month. Then there’s V-1 Propane + Idaho Power + Lakeport Utilities + trash + Blue River Bank for the mattress loan + insurance on the Pontiac + flip phone + snowplowing so she can get the car out of the driveway + $2,652.31 past due on the Visa + health insurance, ha ha, just kidding, she’ll never afford health insurance.

She finds at-will employment cleaning rooms at the Aspen Leaf Lodge—$10.65 an hour—and picks up dinner shifts at the Pig N’ Pancake—$3.45 an hour plus tips. If no one is ordering pancakes, Mr. Burkett makes her clean the walk-in, and no one tips you for cleaning the walk-in.

Every weekday six-year-old Seymour gets off the school bus by himself, walks down Arcady Lane by himself, opens the front door by himself. Eat a waffle and watch a Starboy and do not leave the house. Are you listening, Possum? Can you touch your ears? Can you cross your heart?

He touches his ears. Crosses his heart.

Nonetheless, as soon as he gets home, no matter the weather, no matter how deep the snow, he drops his backpack, goes out the sliding door, ducks under the wire, and climbs through the forest to the big dead ponderosa in the clearing halfway up the hill.

Some days he only senses a presence, a tingling at the base of his neck. Some days he hears low, booming whooos riding through the forest. Some days there’s nothing. But on the best days Trustyfriend is right there, drowsing at the same guano-spattered intersection of trunk and limb where Seymour first saw him, ten feet off the ground.

“Hello.”

The owl gazes down at Seymour; the wind ruffles the feathers of his face; in the whirlpool of his attention spins an understanding as old as time.

Seymour says, “It’s not just the desk either, it’s the smell of Mia’s pickle stickers, the way it gets after recess when Duncan and Wesley are all sweaty, and…”

He says, “They say I’m weird. They say I’m scary.”

The owl blinks into the fading light. His head is the size of a volleyball. He looks like the souls of ten thousand trees distilled into a single form.

* * *

One afternoon in November, Seymour is asking Trustyfriend whether loud noises startle him too, whether sometimes it feels as though he hears too much—and does he ever wish the whole world were as quiet as this clearing is right now, where a million tiny silver snowflakes are flying silently through the air?—when the owl drops from its branch, glides across the clearing, and lands in a tree at the far side.

Seymour follows. The owl slips silently down through the trees, back toward the double-wide, calling now and then as though inviting him along. When Seymour reaches the backyard, the owl is perched on top of the house. It sends a big, deep hoo into the falling snow, then twists its gaze to Pawpaw’s old toolshed. Back to Seymour. Back to the toolshed.

“You want me to go in there?”

In the overstuffed gloom of the shed the boy finds a dead spider, a Soviet gas mask, rusty tool boxes, and on a hook above the workbench, a pair of rifle-range ear defenders. When he puts them on, the din of the world fades.

Seymour claps his hands, shakes a coffee can full of bearings, bangs a hammer: all muted, all better. He goes back into the snow and looks up at the owl standing on the gable of the roof. “These? Are these what you meant?”

* * *

Mrs. Onegin allows him to wear the muffs at Recess, during Snack, and at Reflection Time. After five consecutive school days without reprimand, she agrees to let him switch desks.

Miss Slattery the counselor awards him a donut. Bunny buys him a new Starboy DVD.

Better.

Whenever the world becomes too loud, too clamorous, too sharp at the edges, whenever he feels that the roar is creeping too close, he shuts his eyes, clamps the muffs over his ears, and dreams himself into the clearing in the woods. Five hundred Douglas firs sway; NeedleMen parachute through the air; the dead ponderosa stands bone-white beneath the stars.

There is magic in this place.

You just have to sit and breathe and wait.

Seymour makes it through the Thanksgiving Pageant, through the Christmas Music Spectacular, through the pandemonium that is Valentine’s Day. He accepts toaster strudel, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and croutons into his diet. He consents to a bribe-free shampoo every other Thursday. He is working on not flinching when Bunny’s fingernails tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat on the steering wheel.

* * *

One bright spring day Mrs. Onegin leads the first graders through puddles of snowmelt to a light-blue house with a crooked porch on the corner of Lake and Park. The other kids swarm upstairs; a librarian with freckles all over her face finds Seymour alone in Adult Nonfiction. He has to lift one of the cups of his ear defenders to hear her.

“How big did you say he is? Does he sort of look like he’s wearing a bow tie?”