I thought immediately—and guiltily—of the call I’d made to Mr. Harrigan’s phone. I told myself he was dead and couldn’t have had anything to do with it. I told myself that even if stuff like that were possible outside of comic book horror stories, I hadn’t specifically wished Kenny dead, I just wanted to be left alone, but that seemed somehow lawyerly. And I kept remembering something Mrs. Grogan had said the day after the funeral, when I called Mr. Harrigan a good guy for putting us in his will.

Not so sure about that. He was square-dealing, all right, but you didn’t want to be on his bad side.

Dusty Bilodeau had gotten on Mr. Harrigan’s bad side, and surely Kenny Yanko would have been, too, for beating me up when I wouldn’t shine his fucking boots. Only Mr. Harrigan no longer had a bad side. I kept telling myself that. Dead people don’t have bad sides. Of course phones that haven’t been charged for three months can’t ring and then play messages (or take them), either . . . but Mr. Harrigan’s had rung, and I had heard his rusty old man’s voice. So I felt guilty, but I also felt relieved. Kenny Yanko would never come back on me. He was out of my road.

Later that day, during my free period, Ms. Hargensen came down to the gym where I was shooting baskets and took me into the hall.

“You were moping in class today,” she said.

“No, I wasn’t.”

“You were and I know why, but I’m going to tell you something. Kids your age have a Ptolemaic view of the universe. I’m young enough to remember.”

“I don’t know what—”

“Ptolemy was a Roman mathematician and astrologer who believed the earth was the center of the universe, a stillpoint everything else revolved around. Children believe their entire worlds revolve around them. That sense of being at the center of everything usually starts to fade by the time you’re twenty or so, but you’re a long way from that.”

She was leaning close to me, very serious, and she had the most beautiful green eyes. Also, the smell of her perfume was making me a little dizzy.

“I can see you’re not following me, so let me dispense with the metaphor. If you’re thinking you had something to do with the Yanko boy’s death, forget it. You didn’t. I’ve seen his records, and he was a kid with serious problems. Home problems, school problems, psychological problems. I don’t know what happened, and I don’t want to know, but I see a blessing here.”

“What?” I asked. “That he can’t beat me up anymore?”

She laughed, exposing teeth as pretty as the rest of her. “There’s that Ptolemaic view of the world again. No, Craig, the blessing is that he was too young to get a license. If he’d been old enough to drive, he might have taken some other kids with him. Now go back to gym and shoot some baskets.”

I started away, but she grabbed my wrist. Eleven years later I can still remember the electricity I felt. “Craig, I could never be glad when a child dies, not even a bad actor like Kenneth Yanko. But I can be glad it wasn’t you.”

Suddenly I wanted to tell her everything, and I might have done it. But just then the bell rang, classroom doors opened, and the hall was full of chattering kids. Ms. Hargensen went her way and I went mine.

* * *

That night I turned on my phone and at first just stared at it, gathering my courage. What Ms. Hargensen had said that morning made sense, but Ms. Hargensen didn’t know that Mr. Harrigan’s phone still worked, which was impossible. I hadn’t had a chance to tell her and believed—erroneously, as it turned out—that I never would.

It won’t work this time, I told myself. It had one last spurt of energy, that’s all. Like a lightbulb that flashes bright just before burning out.

I hit his contact, expecting—hoping, actually—for silence or a message telling me the phone was no longer in service. But it rang, and after a few more rings, Mr. Harrigan was once more in my ear. “I’m not answering my phone now. I will call you back if it seems appropriate.”

“It’s Craig, Mr. Harrigan.”

Feeling foolish, talking to a dead man—one who would be growing mold on his cheeks by now (I had done my research, you see). At the same time not feeling foolish at all. Feeling scared, like someone treading on unhallowed ground.

“Listen . . .” I licked my lips. “You didn’t have anything to do with Kenny Yanko dying, did you? If you did . . . um . . . knock on the wall.”

I ended the call.

I waited for a knock.

None came.

The next morning, I had a message from pirateking1. Just six letters: a a a. C C x.

Meaningless.

It scared the hell out of me.

* * *

That autumn I thought a lot about Kenny Yanko (the current story making the rounds was that he had fallen from the second floor of his house while trying to sneak out in the middle of the night). I thought even more about Mr. Harrigan, and about his phone, which I now wished I’d thrown into Castle Lake. There was a fascination, okay? The fascination with strange things we all feel. Forbidden things. On several occasions I almost called Mr. Harrigan’s phone, but I never did, at least not then. Once I’d found his voice reassuring, the voice of experience and success, the voice, you could say, of the grandfather I’d never had. Now I couldn’t remember that voice as it had been on our sunny afternoons, talking about Charles Dickens or Frank Norris or D. H. Lawrence or how the Internet was like a broken watermain. Now all I could think of was the old-man rasp, like sandpaper that’s almost worn out, telling me he would call me back if it seemed appropriate. And I thought of him in his coffin. The mortician from Hay & Peabody had no doubt gummed down his eyelids, but how long did that gum last? Were his eyes open down there? Were they staring up into the dark as they rotted in their sockets?

These things preyed on my mind.

A week before Christmas, Reverend Mooney asked me to come into the vestry so we could “have a chat.” He did most of the chatting. My father was worried about me, he said. I was losing weight, and my grades had slipped. Was there anything I wanted to tell him? I thought it over and decided there might be. Not everything, but some of it.

“If I tell you something, can it stay between us?”

“As long as it doesn’t have to do with self-harm or a crime—a serious crime—the answer is yes. I’m not a priest and this isn’t the Catholic confessional, but most men of faith are good at keeping secrets.”

So I told him that I’d had a fight with a boy from school, a bigger boy named Kenny Yanko, and he’d beat me up pretty good. I said I never wished Kenny dead, and I’d certainly not prayed for it, but he had died, almost right after our fight, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I told him what Ms. Hargensen had said about how kids believed everything had to do with them, and how it wasn’t true. I said that helped a little, but I still thought I might have played a part in Kenny’s death.

The Rev smiled. “Your teacher was right, Craig. Until I was eight, I avoided stepping on sidewalk cracks so I wouldn’t inadvertently break my mother’s back.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.” He leaned forward. His smile went away. “I will keep your confidence if you will keep mine. Do you agree?”