“I don’t want to be. Please.” I looked at him when I said it.

“Where’s Ellen?”

“She’s at home, but she’s going away to camp next week, so she’ll be gone.”

“Good.”

I had a sudden sensation of the sky spinning. I sat up. Wilson was stretched out next to me, relaxed and leaning back on his elbows. I pulled my knees in toward me.

“New Converse?” Even my mom hadn’t noticed.

“Yeah. Except I already messed them up.” I pointed to the stain. “Blood.”

“Whose?”

“A deer that got hit last night.”

“You’ve been out examining roadkill? Or took one out with your brother’s Western Flyer?”

“No. Someone hit it on Horseshoe. We saw it on the way home from babysitting.” I told him about meeting Grady Adams on the road. I didn’t know why I had started to have a regular conversation with him. His craziness was wrecking our lives, and he had just confirmed that he was watching us.

“I have to go,” I said. I left him in the middle of the laurel and rhododendron, lying on our moss carpet like it was his Kingdom.

18

Sage had called and said to come up. I hadn’t been to her house since Grady Adams drove me home and mentioned Ellen. Most summers, I’d have been there until late at night, playing kick-the-can in the dark with Sage and her brothers and other Valley Forge Mountain kids, or in her basement eating Charles Pretzels from large tins they bulk-ordered, watching The Love Boat or Fantasy Island and sneaking out to smoke Charlotte’s Kents and listening to Rolling Stones eight-tracks. I walked to Sage’s at dusk, vigilant. Wings whirred at my ears; I brushed them away and felt the clammy touch of skin against my fingers. There was no visible moon. Before I’d left the house, Thomas pointed to the moon calendar above the kitchen table. He’d come back earlier from the shore, tanned and healthy looking. He said it was great, and I didn’t ask too many questions. There was a black circle positioned on Wednesday, July 1, the new moon. “It’s the first day,” he said, “so you won’t see it.”

Thomas made a moon calendar every year. Dad had told us that when he was growing up, they always knew the phases of the moon and how the tides would change according to what the moon was doing. They needed to know for fishing and harvesting shellfish he said, not like here in America, where no one knew where anything came from anymore.