“Just let me clean it.” I dabbed at scratches on her face and wiped the dirt from her chin. My hand was shaking. She jumped out of a car. I opened the towel and looked again at Ellen’s right arm and leg. They were both torn raw. The cuts weren’t deep, but they stretched across the skin and were dotted black with dirt and grit. I opened Mrs. Boucher’s medicine cabinet above the sink and found a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

“Don’t look,” I said.

Ellen turned her face away, and I poured a capful and tipped it down her right arm, flushing the cuts.

“We have to take off your shirt.” I undid the shoulder buttons on the pinafore and folded it down to her waist. Ellen pulled her shirt over her head and winced as she raised her right arm. She tugged the towel toward her chest, caving in on herself. She looked so small in her white training bra, the one that we teased her about, that she didn’t need. There was grit all the way up her forearm and elbow to her shoulder. I kept thinking she might have hit her head and didn’t know it, or there could be internal injuries. Her face was sickly white. She began talking.

“After you guys drove off, I started walking toward home, but I knew I was going to end up in the pitch-black because it was so dark already. I know it was stupid, but I decided I’d hitchhike.”

“Oh, shit. Ellen, no.”

“I walked a few yards and just turned to face the traffic and put out my thumb. I was scared, but I just thought it would be better to hitch than try to walk in the dark. And my thumb wasn’t out even thirty seconds when a car pulled up.”

I sat back from her and kneeled up to rinse the washcloth in Mrs. Boucher’s sink. Bits of cinder washed out along with swirls of blood.

“A car stopped. Then what?”

“It came up right beside me. It was black, low to the ground. I didn’t even look to see who the driver was. I just opened the door and sat down inside, thinking I was lucky to get a ride so fast.” She began fiddling with the ends of her hair. “I didn’t see the driver until we started moving. I turned to say thank you, and I saw him then. I knew I’d made a mistake.” Her right leg started to shake. “He was so creepy looking. He had long white-blond hair, so long he was sitting on it.”

“Oh my God.”

“His hair was like a Barbie doll’s, except on a man, and whiter.”

“How old?”

“I don’t know. Maybe thirty? Older? He looked like Gregg Allman, except ugly. Even his eyebrows were white.”

“Like albino?”