Gabriel hummed to himself as he walked home from the library in the late-August heat. He had been psyched when Uncle Barry had given him permission to go without supervision. His mom was at her new job, and as much as he was glad to be staying with Barry, it was boring with a capital B. You could only watch so many game shows on TV before you wanted to hang yourself. He’d tried to drag Justin along, but he wasn’t much of a reader. He hadn’t even looked up from his sketchbook as he said “hard pass” before Gabriel had left.
Now Gabriel walked home with a shiny new library card in his pocket and five books in his backpack. Three were fiction of various genres, and the other two were subjects that piqued his interest, one on Native American history, and the other was a new book about brain sc
