Jay didn't want to stay for dinner—said he wasn't hungry—but he wanted to play after, so he just rode his bike around the old farm while we went in. Dinner was about as normal as could be expected, with Great Grandma rambling on with Penny about the horses that used to live on the farm and Grandpa just staring at the food on his plate, hardly touching it. The big white cat prowled around, hoping for scraps, and I stared at my food, thinking less about eating it and more about sneaking it to the cat. A couple of times, I looked over at Grandpa and wondered what he was thinking about and whether my brain wasn't thinking something too different.

After dinner but before it started to get dark, Great Grandma told me and Penny to go play outside. I grumbled that my sister had to come, but the two of us swung out the front door and onto the patio. Jay saw us and stopped going in circles on the driveway, leaving his bike to fall to the ground as he jogged over.

"Look, Jay! It's Great Grandma's tick jar!" Penny had actually picked the disgusting jar up and was waving it in Jay's face. The bloated bugs sloshed around like marbleized blueberries. I almost threw up in my mouth.

Jay wasn't interested in anything a little girl had to show him. He waved Penny aside. "Rob, you wanna hear a story?"

I raised an eyebrow. "What kind of story?" Stories were for school reading time.

"It's an old ghost story. Happened here a long time ago. My dad told me it."

My dad used to tell me stories, too, I remembered. Frowning, I said, "Who cares? I don't believe in ghosts."

Jay shrugged and bent over to pick at the moss growing around one of the patio bricks. "All right. It's just about your Grandpa is all."

My interest piqued a little, but I said nothing.

"Our Grandpa?" chirped Penny, obviously not offended that Jay had snubbed her moments ago. "You got a story about our Grandpa? I want to hear it! Go on, tell it!"

I still didn't talk, even when Jay looked at me like he was waiting for my approval.

"Please, tell it, tell it!" Penny chimed. Her energy never died.

Jay stood back up from picking at the moss and stretched his arms over his head. "Sure, ok." He sat at the table where the tick jar was still sloshing after Penny had plopped it down. The jar didn't even seem to bother him. "A long time ago, before you were even born, your grandpa was a kid."

"That's deep," I told him.

"Don't interrupt!" Penny chided.

I rolled my eyes, but Jay just went on.

"Your Grandpa was friends with a kid named Jimmy."

That name caught my attention, but I didn't want Jay to know it. I acted like I was just tossing pebbles out on the gravel road.

"They were friends, and then one day, all of a sudden, Jimmy disappears. Just up and pops into oblivion. And everybody said your Grandpa had something to do with it."

Jay stopped. The absence of his voice was real weird; we could hear cicadas buzzing all around—they hadn't seemed so loud until he stopped. I waited for him to say more, but when he didn't, I said, "That's it? That's your story?"

Penny was disappointed, too. "My dad used to tell much better stories. They were more than five seconds long. They were about dragons and gnomes and fireflies."

"Well excuse me for living," Jay muttered. "I just wanted to tell you about it, cause he's your Grandpa."

"What do you mean?" I said. "Are you serious about it? My Grandpa had a friend that disappeared, and then everybody thought it was his fault? Did they ever find out what happened to the kid?"

"I don't know," Jay said. "It's just a story. Everybody round here knows it. About how your grandpa and his friend went camping one time. And Jimmy didn't come back from the trip. And the kids at school said it was your grandpa had something to do with it."

The night I'd caught Grandpa trying to run away—when he thought he was a kid—he'd mentioned Jimmy. I remembered it! He said that . . . that something . . . "Listen," I said, pulling Jay aside so my sister couldn't hear what I told him. "Listen. My Grandpa told me about something that happened. I thought he was crazy, but maybe he wasn't! Maybe he was remembering something that actually happened! He said—" I gave Penny, who was creeping up on us, an icy glare, and she backed off. "He said that something got Jimmy. Something got him. Nobody believed him, though."

I let go of Jay, not caring if my sister heard the rest. It wasn't scary.

"And he said he was going to sneak out and run off so that whatever got Jimmy couldn't get him."

Jay looked at me weird.

"I'm serious! It's just—see, my Grandpa's got Alzheimer's or something. And sometimes, he just starts talking like a crazy person. Sometimes he makes no sense, and then one time, he thought he was a kid again." I paused, feeling sort of half-empty all of a sudden, like a watering can someone had poured the water out of. "And sometimes, too, he's normal. I like those times best."

Jay clapped me on the shoulder. "It's okay, Rob. My grandma has the same problem."

"She has Alzheimer's?"

"No, she's just plain crazy."

I chewed my tongue. "You think we'll end up like that, someday?"

Penny laughed, and I turned to look at her, but she wasn't even listening to us. She was petting the three-legged dog that had wandered onto the patio.

"Nah," Jay said, responding to me but also staring at Penny. "I'm never going to be old."

That sounded reasonable to me.

"More important," Jay continued, "is figuring out what the heck that graffiti on the school was all about."

I agreed with him absentmindedly. The graffiti was interesting enough, but now I was thinking about new things. This mystery with my Grandpa . . . could something have really happened? When I'd convinced him not to run away the other night, when he thought he was a teenager, he'd seemed very sincere. I didn't think he was making up those memories. The question was, though—could I get any more out of him about it? This urge to try rose up in me like a geyser just come out of the ground, and I interrupted whatever Jay was saying to blurt, "Hey! I gotta go!"

Jay stopped mid-sentence and just stared at me. I crawled out of my thoughts and remembered where I was.

"I mean . . . I want to go talk to my Grandpa about what you said."

"Right now?" Jay frowned.

"Yeah. I mean . . . I just . . ."

"Can't right now, anyway," Penny interjected. "He just walked over to that field."

Jay and I both turned our heads in the direction Penny pointed; she was right. There was Grandpa's receding figure, walking through the tall grass field to the right of the house, past the carport and past Great Grandma's shed of stuff. We had been too busy talking to notice him come out the front door and head off.

"Where's he going?" Jay asked.

Neither Penny nor I could answer him.

Without a word, I started off after Grandpa. I didn't know what state of mind he was in, but I just had a feeling he shouldn't be by himself.

"We should tell Great Grandma!" Penny called after me, but I left that up to her. Within seconds, I was smacking through the grass, not really thinking about the snakes that I'd been warned might be hiding there.

Grandpa was a good twenty yards ahead of me, but he was easy to see in the early evening sunlight. I wondered if I should overtake him but then decided that I should gain on him but stay a little behind. I didn't know who he was right then, and if I startled him, who knew what could happen.

He walked through the fields and then emerged onto a gravel path that he and I (at a distance behind) followed away from the farm buildings and the main road that led to Great Grandma's property. The trees thickened, and soon, the sky was blotted out because of how far they leaned over the path. Only little bits of the early evening sunlight shone through the leaves. In the middle of the path was a line of grass, striping the gravel right down the middle, like an old-fashioned horse-and-buggy road. There were lots of grasshoppers zipping about, and they kept landing on my socks and bare knees. I would've smacked at them, but I was afraid of making any noise that might cause Grandpa to turn around. Once or twice, I looked behind me to see if Penny or Jay had followed, because I had the strange feeling that someone was back there, but as far as I could tell, they had stayed at the house.

After about ten solid minutes of walking after Grandpa, I began to wonder if he had any destination at all and if maybe Penny had been right—if maybe I should have told Great Grandma and let her deal with it. Maybe Grandpa was trying to run away again; there wasn't much I could do if he was. I couldn't tackle him or make him go back.

The trees were blocking out more and more of the sunshine. We were really in the woods, now, and the path, even though it was still visible, was starting to look more overgrown. The image of the tick jar flashed through my mind, and I freaked out inside for a minute when I realized that they could be jumping at my legs, trying to get their fangs stuck in my skin. I tried to just keep my eyes on Grandpa and ignore the thoughts in my head—he was getting harder to keep in sight as the brush was wilder and the path began to twist and turn.

Why had I decided to do this? I was starting to realize that I had made a dumb decision. I had no clue where we were going, and it was a long way back, at this point. I didn't even know if I could find my way back through the fields. I wanted my bike. I wanted my friends. Jason and Evan would have come with me, through the woods, and they'd have our potato cannon. I imagined shooting it toward Grandpa, waking him up, making him come back. I would be back with them soon!

Someone was behind me. I could feel it.

I spun around. "Jay, you scared—" But he ran around me so fast I hardly caught sight of him. I followed the direction he'd moved, but again, his dark shape darted around me so that he was still at my back. "Jay . . . stop!" I turned faster, trying to catch him in his movement, but he was too fast. My heart beat hard, I spun and spun, but every time I moved, he moved quicker, so he was always behind me and never quite clear enough . . .

"Boy!"

Firm hands gripped my shoulders. I screamed out loud, but then the hands whirled me around so that I was facing my Grandpa.