The New Kid
The new kid is at the store on Monday, the library on Tuesday, and the school fence on Wednesday, though school is out for summer and the fence is therefore a strange thing to lean on.
He looks about eleven. Grey eyes, grey hoodie, hair a color you keep failing to remember. He is polite the way a dictionary is polite — every word correct, none of them worn in — and everywhere he goes he asks, sooner or later, in a voice like far-off weather being friendly: “Have you seen any unusual animals lately?”
When Mrs. Patel asked his name, Finn reports (Finn has assembled a dossier; of course he has), the kid paused for a genuinely strange amount of time — “like he was buffering, Madison” — then looked slightly downward and to the left, and said: “Rufus.”
Slightly downward and to the left is where Mrs. Patel's beagle was standing. Wearing his collar. With his name tag on it.
“So either his name is really Rufus,” says Finn, closing the dossier with the gravity of a prosecutor, “and it's a coincidence about the dog. Or we have a situation where a thing that is not a boy read a dog tag under pressure.” Sera, consulted through the cellar window, is quiet for a long time and then says only: “Find out what he does at dusk. And Madison — be careful. But be kind and careful. Nothing that hesitates before choosing a name has finished deciding what it is.”