"March to your own drummer," people seem to always be saying. *But just try it,* thinks sixteen-year-old Tim, *and you wind up with a shrink.* Happiest when he's running alone on the beach, aware that he's growing more and more "dissociable," as his school headbaster describes him, Tim is determined to resist all attempts to change him. The only person in school who seems as alone as he is Felice, whom Tim gets to know when they begin to work together on the school paper. What begins as a shared interest in writing and in running pecomes a relationship in which Felice and Tim not only help each other become caring, independent people but find that they can communicate on the deepest human level, the psychic.