“What do you think it is?”

“How would I know?”

“I don’t know, you found it.”

Billy Myers was the kid in the neighborhood who knew everything. It made the other kids not like him so much.

He said, “It’s obviously some kind of space debris.” Then he backpedaled, “or it’s coming up from the Earth’s core.” That was as close as he could get to saying, “I don’t know what it is either.”

Max Bradford was the coolest kid in the neighborhood. He was a full eighteen months older than the res...