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pronounced like a syllable, but as individual letters.
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said. Bea. Bee. A little name—you had to smile when you said it out loud.
    Of course one part of me wanted to say, “Sorry for what,” in my best Earl imitation, what Mr. Kann had called stone-age nonchalance.
    She turned, standing right in the place I had parked my Honda four nights ago. “Are you sure,” the cops had asked, “this was where you parked it last?” Its distinctive grease stains were still there under the streetlight, a cluster of black oil spots. Bea put her face up to mine, her cheeks cold, although her lips were warm. “When is the test?” she asked.
    â€œNine-thirty A . M .,” I said.
    â€œI’ll pick you up,” she said. “About eight-thirty?”
    Metal signs with the words NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH gleam from the streetlights. The signs display a pair of keen eyes looking out a window. The two cops who took my stolen car report, a man and a woman, had said this was the worst area for car thefts. Not for rape, not for robbery or murder. The rapists and murderers walk over into this green, tree-lined neighborhood when they don’t have money for a cab.
    â€œI’ll just take the bus,” I said.
    When Bea was gone I stood listening just inside the house, wanting to be sure I didn’t hear my mother’s Volvo humming up the drive. I slipped back into my room and carefully withdrew my jacket from the top shelf of the closet.
    I braced my feelings for disappointment. It would turn out to be a toy or a replica fit only to be mounted on a wall.
    It was flat black, no shine to the metal. The hammer and grip were crosshatched with a fine, rough no-slip surface. I held it flat in my hand, afraid of it. I kept myself thinking, talking inwardly, sure that this wasn’t a real gun. It had to be a stage prop.
    The barrel was not filled in like a starting pistol, and the chambers of the cylinder were occupied. This was a loaded gun, a revolver with six bullets. I put it down gently on the top of my desk and stepped back. I read about weapons in magazines, and once my dad and I had gone to a gun club in Fremont with a friend showing off his new Colt Python. I remembered having no trouble placing shots in the middle of the white paper target.
    A .38. The thing lay beside the gym sock and the computer. From my place beside the closet door I could see a scuff on the wooden grip, where the harsh asphalt had abraded the walnut stain. If the gun went off now it would blow the pillow all over the room.
    When I was in first grade my dad brought home an ant farm. We set it up in the dining-room window. In those days my mother and my father were already beginning to retire their marriage, my dad spending two or three weekends a month away from home, most of the summer in the field, working hard on his first book, the one that had made his name.
    The little reddish insects hollowed out tunnels, a lace of empty space, sunlight or darkness, that stretched down through the sandy earth. The bread crumbs I sprinkled into their world, the eyedropper of water, allowed them to thrive, manipulating the boulders of food down the shafts of their city.
    Sometimes at night, if I could not sleep, I imagined a city underground, a human city, its many galleries harboring rest and play, stairways ever deeper, into greater and greater safety. Sometimes during the day I sketched these tunnels, the chambers for food, the halls for sports, the deepest, most secure rooms for slumber.
    I didn’t know where to hide the weapon. I slipped the gun into the bottom drawer of my dresser, with old drawings and school reports: “The Vanishing Mayan Cities of the Yucatan,” “Pioneers of Flight.” Then, very carefully, I withdrew it and covered it artfully with shoes in the bottom of my closet.
    I undressed and pulled on my pajamas, but I knew I couldn’t sleep with it in the room. I