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her—”
    “—then he won’t have a job and that won’t be stable, will it? Or what if he splits from you instead and makes Vivien his partner, will that be stable? Even now, when he’s blackmailing somebody, or when you fight every night, and cry, is that stable?”
    Sing hey for the family values, for which Harvey Spiers so loudly proselytized.
    “Eavesdropping is a sin!” Betsy snapped. “Why do you hate us so much? Why won’t you call him Dad, the way he asked? He provides the roof over your head! I get one last chance at happiness and look what you do to it! What did I do to deserve treatment like this?” She was winding up like a tornado, and we were supposed to flee.
    “Mrs. Spiers,” I said, “I want to thank you for coming here so promptly. And thank you, too, for agreeing to Mr. Ulrich’s visiting his son. That was selfless and generous, and I’m sure it means a great deal to Jake, as it would to any boy who’d been separated from his natural father.”
    I wondered whether she heard me. Or whether her mind was on what life might be like without her son around and with only worthless, cheating, lying, hypocritical Harvey Spiers. Who might dump her and opt for Mother Viv and fifteen minutes of fame.
    I wondered to what lengths an hysterical Poor-Li’l-Me might go to save whatever it was she thought she had.

Five
    If Havermeyer had thought to restore peace by capitulating to the Moral Ecologists, he was dead wrong. If he’d imagined he was clearing the way for a serene Open House, he was wronger still.
    What he did was generate Philly Prep’s first demonstration of moral outrage. I’ll bet most of our students think the First Amendment is a rock group, and even if it were explained, would be hard-pressed to care about censorship when they don’t place any particular value on reading in the first place.
    So their reaction may have had nothing to do with the forfeited books. It might have been that the weather on Wednesday morning was benign and welcoming, close to a miracle. A thin wash of spring-colored sunshine made the out-of-doors infinitely preferable to winter-weary classrooms.
    For whatever reason, by the end of homeroom, word of Havermeyer’s appalling decision and a plan of action had spread by interclass tom-tom, and when the bell rang for first period, the troops, as one, headed for the pavement. Teachers followed, exhorting halfheartedly, as if by rote. Nobody was happy about what Havermeyer had done.
    Maybe he’d hear the voices of his students. Maybe he’d even listen. Learn something.
    “Moral Ecologists suck!” a boy near me shouted, but it was almost a tongue twister. It was in competition with other instant slogans as well. In fact, a pundits’ power struggle was in progress, slogans hurled one against another, creativity playing with words and ideas.
    “Don’t break my art!”
    “Don’t ban books. Ban Moral Ecologists!”
    “We have a right to see bare buns!” Some ideas were less lofty than others.
    “What kind of school won’t let us read?”
    “Don’t check us out of the library!”
    If they’d known they were working at literary craft, framing ideas in words that were clever, articulate, and succinct, they’d have applied the brakes. But they didn’t even suspect.
    Creativity aside, the result was chaos. Too many words, too many people, and too little walkway created a dangerous situation. Students overflowed off the pavement, treating face-offs with commuter traffic as a game. Brakes squealed, and teachers dispersed along the student body’s perimeters, as if ready to have cars smite us in lieu of our charges. We were all inspired to new heights of nobility.
    Across the street, on the fringe of the Square, Moral Ecologists stood in clumps like an infestation we hadn’t properly exterminated, observing what they had wrought with grim satisfaction. Only one of them looked uncertain or ashamed, a man in a Russian-style fur hat who seemed unwilling to meet