on Llewelyn’s face when he reached the car.

“What’s going on?”

He had looked down, and seen the plastic bags Llewelyn had been carrying. The bags that his grandmother saved by the boxful, with “Silver Barn Farms” emblazoned on them. The bags had been bulging with what Brandon had identified, in silhouette, as His Stuff: the books, and pads, and smattering if model boxes and hobby supplies that he had been keeping at his grand mother’s apartment, on what he had come to prize as his sanctuary — the corner of his grandmother’s guest room where he did his homework each afternoon. This had been an arrangement into which he had more or less wandered — and only partly by default — over the last six months.

“I HATE it here!” he had shouted one afternoon, arguing with his mother in their Broad Channel living room. He had been late to that morning for the third consecutive time, prompting his homeroom teacher to — gleefully, it has seemed, despite the man’s eyes being perpetually concealed with the sunglasses he inexplicably wore all day — sentence him to detention.

Brandon’s explanation — that he had been sitting for an hour waiting for a tow truck with his stepfather inside a cold dented Dodge station wagon whose driveshaft lay inert on the pavement beneath it — had prompted nothing more than a partly-concealed raised eyebrow, and a no dice, pal, third strike, you’re out! that had sounded exactly like an unfunny attempt at coolness by a sweaty, balding algebra teacher. A teacher wearing high tops, and a fake leather cowboy belt strained to its limits above the pair of Jordache jeans that he wore every day. The students called him “Jordass” behind his back.

Brandon had shoved the detention slip — crumpled from Brandon’s having balled it up and thrown it at the tiled wall of the school hallway — at his mother later that day. “Look at this! I NEVER get in trouble. I NEVER got detention before! Only since we had to move out here and I have to go to school in these piece of shit cars!”