"Michael Haley, a whip-smart seventh-grader growing up in rural Mississippi in the early 1980s, has a precociously metaphysical turn of mind, a brand-new girlfriend who won’t come out of her bedroom, and plenty of neighborhood pals to distract him from both. But as he passes the long afternoon of this story roaming their streets, yards, and woods with the likes of Zeke Barry (his girlfriend’s brother and a born skeptic) and John Dixon Montgomery (a diminutive fishing genius plagued by assorted maladies), unsettling questions won’t leave Michael alone—like whether God will accept his gift of a dug-up, three-days-dead possum, whether he and his friends are in fact real, and why Ol’ Cletus, a mysterious, middle-aged recluse, appears to be stalking him. This last question, above all, will test Michael’s courage to seek answers."--Back cover.