SAL
When the Christmas break ended, Sal boarded the school bus with a sense of dislocation. The two weeks he’d spent with his uncles had seemed much longer than that, and the remote, timeless silence of the Prentisses’ valley had stretched the distance between the double-wide and the middle school a little farther each day. It had begun to seem as though he would never go back, that his feet might never leave Prentiss land again, and the hills had drawn tighter around him, like a cocoon. Getting on the bus felt both like an escape and a betrayal.
But as the bus turned west on the interstate, Sal’s thoughts turned forward, to Mr Merkel. He wondered how Mr Merkel had spent the break, and then he imagined him and Lucas having lunches together, talking about the Riemann Hypothesis. Maybe the
