Professor Piot believed in what he called observed knowledge, and he was always telling his students about all the things one could learn about the past by noticing the details of the present. In France, for example, where Professor Piot was from, you could tell if a town had had monarchical or republican political leanings, say, a hundred and fifty years ago, by whether or not the trains stopped there. If the town had a train station, and you had to bet, you’d better bet it had been republican, because the towns in good standing with the new République were the ones that got the rail lines to the capital. And Professor Piot told them you could go to little towns and look at where the World War One monument had been placed in relation to the church to see how religious the people were by the time the war was over and the town’s young men were dead. There was actually a statistically significant relationship between the number of local boys who had died in battle and the distance between the church and the town’s memorial to the soldiers that were lost. The more dead soldiers, the less inclined the townspeople were to build a monument in the churchyard. They’d put it up in front of city hall instead. There were some villages, Professor Piot had told them, where the World War One monuments included broken crosses—broken on purpose, maybe even carved that way, to show that the people of such and such a little town knew what was up, up there.
As Neil slept, the drone of the bus motor gave way to the nasal patter of Professor Piot’s voice. Neil hoped it was an indication of his future greatness as an academic rather than of extreme nerdiness that during restless sleep his dreams tended to center on the history department, and that Professor Piot’s voice in particular seemed to stick in his head, maybe because he had two classes with him that semester. Neil had even started thinking his own thoughts in Professor Piot’s accent, which was definitely weird, and during their meetings—Professor Piot was also Neil’s faculty advisor—he had to concentrate very hard to make sure he didn’t accidentally gargle his r’s.
Neil felt something move against his foot. He opened his eyes. The little girl across the aisle had crawled under her mother’s legs and was reaching for Neil’s father’s present. “It’s okay,” Neil said, as her mother hauled her back into her seat. “I’d let her open it, just—it’s not really mine.”
He settled his head against a new, cooler spot on the window. They were well out of London now. Something bright and yellow was blooming in the fields in all directions. The color rose and fell over little hills, like someone had taken a highlighter to the entire landscape.
Professor Piot would be able to learn something from the view out the bus window. Neil looked at the unbroken expanse of yellow flowers, but all he could think of was that there weren’t sprinkler systems in England. The Colorado prairie might have seemed endless to the pioneers, but every patch of green back home now had a dotted line running through it, wheels and pipes and bursts of high-powered water making frets in the landscape. When Neil was a kid he and his cousins used to run through Pop’s sprinklers on summer afternoons, and the water felt like the smack of a two-by-four when it hit them across the back. But in England there was rain, and Neil wondered if British farmers led a fundamentally sweeter existence, not always fixing broken irrigation pumps and wondering who upstream was taking more than their share. The yellow of the fields was so bright it hurt his eyes, so Neil looked out through his eyelashes for the rest of the trip, thinking about Nan and Pop’s ranch and wondering how his dad was doing now that he was running it all on his own.
The girls in the flat next door thought it was cute that Neil’s father was a farmer—actually his dad had been an English teacher, but Neil left that part out. During halftime the night before Neil had told the girls about the first time Neil’s dad brought Neil’s mom home to meet the family, which happened to be on a day Pop was castrating bull calves. Nan had served Rocky Mountain oysters for supper—the marriage was obviously doomed from the start—and Amanda thought the idea of breaded testicles was so funny that she sort of fell against Neil’s shoulder while she was laughing and stayed there through the penalty kicks. Neil made a mental note to ask his father if anything interesting had been happening at the ranch in the months since they’d talked. It was too bad the cows had been sold after Pop died; it would have been great to have some stories about calving chains or coyote problems to tell the girls.
Now that he was finally delivering the Christmas present, Neil was honestly looking forward to talking to his father, and he figured that with the time difference it would work out perfectly to give him a call when he got back to London that night. He’d tell his dad about Professor Piot’s class trip to East Sussex, where they’d tramped through privately owned meadows looking for the famous and possibly nonexistent ditch where the English made their last stand during the Battle of Hastings. He would save the news about getting picked to go to Paris for last, knowing that when his father was proud of him for something he tended to choke up and get awkward and would probably end up hanging up before Neil was actually done talking. Unlike Neil’s mother, who didn’t see why Neil wouldn’t want to spend one last summer at home, working at the movie theater and saving money for school, Neil’s father would understand that it was a big deal to be the only underclassman on Professor Piot’s research team.
The bus station in Swindon wasn’t much of a station, just a place for buses to turn around and a covered waiting area. The bus stopped and Neil peeled his face off the window. His cheek felt flattened and cold from the glass, like a refrigerator cookie stuck to wax paper. His mouth had the briny, nutty taste of terrible breath. He searched for a piece of gum in his jacket pockets and forgot his father’s package under the seat, then had to fight the getting-off crowd to go back and get it. In the bottom of his pocket he found a restaurant mint, long since unwrapped and fuzzy from his jacket lining. At first it stuck to his tongue, then began to dissolve slowly, turning one half of his mouth sticky and cool. Neil’s headache had concentrated itself into a single jab down his spine and his stomach felt gritty and hollow. He needed a Coke and a cheeseburger and a nap and a toothbrush. With his father’s present under his arm—the real-feather fletch of an arrow now sticking almost completely out of a hole in Santa’s chin—Neil was the last person to get off the bus.