He was cross. Nobody, not even his friends, really seemed to believe that he hadn’t done it. They believed he hadn’t intended to, but like Coach Bonhomme, they couldn’t get past the evidence of their own eyes. Or in his parents’ case, the evidence of so many other eyes. “Never mind,” they said forgivingly, infuriatingly, to Jessup. “You didn’t mean to hurt him. It was an accident.”The only person who was sympathetic, to his surprise, was Emily.“Grown-ups can be so dumb,” she said. “If you know you didn’t do it, then of course you didn’t.”“But who did?”“Maybe Pete tripped.”“No way. One minute he was coming toward me, and the next he was flying in the other direction. I mean flying.”“Weird,” Emily said, shaking her head. “Like the TV, and the lights flickering, and stuff. I was telling Nat about that today. She said maybe it was sunspots.” Nat was Natalie, her closest friend at school, who was a serious astronomer and on fine winter nights spent hours of after-school time looking through her telescope.“Emily!
