“What am I supposed to say if someone asks?”

My mother hesitated. “Tell them your brother’s attorney said you can’t talk about it.”

“Is that true?”

“I have no idea.”

I took a deep breath. I was going to come clean, to tell her about breaking into Jess’s house. “Mom, I have to talk to you about something…”

“Can I take a rain check?” she said. “I want to be there when the doors open at nine. There’s plenty of cereal for breakfast, and you can take the bus.”

Now, I’m sitting in biology next to Elise Howath, who is a pretty good lab partner even if she’s a girl, when she slips a note to me.

I’m really sorry to hear about your brother.

I want to thank her, for being nice. For being the first person to give a shit about Jacob instead of crucifying him like the media and the stupid court already have for what he’s done.

What he’s done.

I grab my backpack and run out of class, even though Mr. Jennison is still yammering away, and he doesn’t even comment (which tells me, more than anything, that this is not my life but a parallel universe). I keep walking down the hall without a hall pass, and no one stops me. Not when I cruise past the principal’s office and the guidance department. Not when I bust through the double doors near the gym into the blinding light of afternoon and start walking.

Apparently in the public schools, if you have a relative arrested for murder, the administration and teachers pretend you are invisible.

Which, to be honest, isn’t really all that different from the way I was treated before.

I wish I had my skateboard with me. Then I could move faster, maybe outdistance the facts that keep circling in my head:

I saw Jess Ogilvy alive and well. Shortly after that, Jacob went to her house.

Now she’s dead.

I’ve seen my brother put a chair through a wall and smash a window with his hand. I’ve been in his way, sometimes, when he has a meltdown. I’ve got the scars to prove it.

You do the math.

My brother is a murderer. I test the words under my breath and immediately feel a pain in my chest. You can’t say it the way you’d say My brother is six feet tall or My brother likes scrambled eggs, even if they are all accurate facts. But the Jacob I knew a week ago is no different than the Jacob I saw this morning. So does that mean I was too stupid to notice some major flaw in my brother? Or that anyone-even Jacob-might suddenly turn into a person you never imagined?

I sure as hell qualify.

All my life I’ve thought I have nothing in common with my brother-and it turns out we are both criminals.

But you didn’t kill anyone.

The voice echoes in my head, an excuse. For all I know, Jacob’s got his reasons, too.

That makes me run faster. But I could be a goddamned bullet and still not manage to outstrip the sad fact that I’m no better than those assholes at school: I have already assumed my brother is guilty.

Behind the school, if you go far enough, you hit a pond. It’s a community hot spot in the winter-on weekends someone lights a bonfire and brings marshmallows to roast; and a few enterprising hockey dads sweep the ice with wide shovels so that pickup games can break out all across its surface. I step onto the ice, even though I don’t have skates with me.

It’s not crowded on a weekday. A few moms with toddlers, pushing milk crates as they learn to skate. An old man in those black figure skates that always make me think of Holland, or the Olympics. He’s doing figure eights. I dump my backpack on the edge of the snow and shuffle my feet little by little, until I am standing dead center.

Every year there’s a competition in Townsend to see when the ice will fully melt. They stick a pole in the ice that’s attached to some kind of digital clock, and when the ice melts enough for the pole to tilt, it trips a switch and records that moment in time. People put money down on which day and hour the ice will melt, and the person with the closest guess gets the jackpot. Last year, I think it was about $4,500.

What if the moment the ice melted was right now?

What if I went under?

Would those kids skating around hear the splash? Would the old man come to my rescue?

My English teacher says a rhetorical question is one that’s asked even though an answer isn’t expected: Is the Pope Catholic? Or Does a bear crap in the woods?

I think it’s a question that has an answer you don’t really want to hear.

Does this dress make me look fat?

Are you really that stupid?

If the ice melts and no one sees me go under, did I ever really exist?

If I were the one in jail, would Jacob believe the worst of me?

Just like that, I sit down in the middle of the pond, on the ice. It’s cold through my jeans. I picture myself freezing from the inside out. They will find me and I’ll be a sculpture, a statue.

“Hey, kid, you okay?” The old man has skated over to me. “You need some help?”

Like I said: an answer you don’t really want to hear.

I didn’t sleep much last night, but when I did, I dreamed. I dreamed that I was breaking Jacob out of jail. I did it by reading through all his CrimeBusters notebooks and copying the behavior of cat burglars. As soon as I rounded the corner of the prison where Jacob was being kept in a cell, he was ready. Jacob, I said, you have to do exactly what I tell you to do, and he did, which is how I knew it was a dream. He was quiet, and he followed my lead, and he didn’t ask any questions. We tiptoed past the guard booth, and we both hopped into a giant trash bin, covering ourselves with paper and garbage. The custodian finally came and wheeled us right through the buzzers and the locked gate, and just as he was about to dump the giant trash bin into the Dumpster outside, I yelled, Now! and Jacob and I jumped out and started running. We ran for hours, until the only things following us were falling stars, and then we finally stopped in a field of tall grass and laid down on our backs on the ground.

I didn’t do it, Jacob told me.

I believe you, I said, and it was really true.

On that day when Jacob was supposed to make a friend for homework, those two little girls he met in the sandbox had to leave. They ran off without saying good-bye, leaving my thirteen-year-old brother alone and digging in the sand.

I was afraid to look at my mother again. So instead, I walked to the sandbox and sat down on the edge. My knees came up to my chin; I was too big for the space-it was crazy to see my brother squeezed into it. I picked up a rock and started to paw through the sand with it. “What are we looking for?” I asked.

“Allosaurus,” Jacob replied.

“How are we going to know when we find it?”

Jacob’s face lit up. “Well, its vertebrae and skull won’t be as heavy as those of other dinosaurs. That’s what the name means, translated: different lizard.”

I imagined any kid Jacob’s age watching him play paleontologist in a sandbox and wondered if he’d ever have a friend.

“Theo,” he suddenly whispered, “you know we’re not really going to find allosaurus in here.”

“Um, yeah.” I laughed. “But if we did, that would be some story, wouldn’t it?”

“The news vans would come,” Jacob said.

“Screw the news, we’d be on Oprah,” I told him. “Two kids who find a dinosaur skeleton in a sandbox. We might even wind up on the Wheaties box.”

“The fabulous Hunt brothers.” Jacob grinned. “That’s what they’d call us.”

“The fabulous Hunt brothers,” I repeated, and I watched Jacob dig to the bottom with his shovel. I wondered how long it would be before I outgrew him.