Your Eyes in Stars

Maybe there is someone in your life right now who will change your world without ever knowing it, and possibly without ever knowing you.

Slater Carr was such a person: a prisoner whose nightly bugle renditions of Taps from The Hill held a small upstate New York town in thrall. Two girls, new friends, one an outsider from Germany, discovered the boy who was a lifer at Cayuta Prison.

"How easily we talked of Slater . . . imagining his life before The Hill. I think we talked about him ore than we cared about him."

Jessie and Elisa also talked a lot about Wolfgang Schwitter, the rich preppie who drove his convertible with the top down, even in winter.

Time and times would changed them all . . . and so would what Slater did one Halloween.

"You think about Slater," Jessie said. "I gave him to you."

A time would come when she would remember saying that to Elisa and regret it with all her heart.