I didn’t want Grady Adams to know. He already didn’t like things about my mom and I didn’t want him to know more. I loved Sage’s dad. He played classical music and collected jazz records. He had a downstairs den with a bar in it, and I’d seen him through the door, levered back in a leather swivel chair, his eyes closed, listening to music. He had a soft southern drawl and always spoke to me like he was interested in what I had to say. He never seemed quite part of everything. Charlotte was the opposite, nervous and elegant. She was blunt in her opinions and loved a good story and wasn’t afraid to exaggerate to make it more colorful. Sage called her dramatic. My mother said Charlotte Adams could land airplanes, the way she talked, swinging her arms and moving her hands.

“No. We’re not telling anyone. Please, Sage. Promise.”

Sage stood and reached out her hand and pulled me to my feet. “Let’s go see Ellen.”

We walked back down the trail, sunlight falling through the canopy all around us. Fallen trees lay collapsed across one another, the bole completely broken on some, leaving upright jagged stumps like open wounds. I held the ointment and pill bottle in my closed fist. I thought about my mom driving the empty roads, looking for Ellen. I wondered if she had waited at her window, looking out, whether she had seen Sage bring Ellen home, how she had tried to tuck Ellen in. Even though I was angry with her, it hurt to think of her like that.

5

Wilson McVay was in my bedroom. He was leaning against our clothes drawers by the window, as relaxed as though he were a regular visitor. He was wearing heavy black boots, black jeans with a black Harley-Davidson belt, and a black T-shirt. Sage and I sat on the lower trundle. Ellen was behind us, propped upright against the wall with pillows all around her. She was still very pale, and the area around her lips was shadowed dusky blue. Marie sat cross-legged on her own bed in a black skirt and T-shirt; a single strand of rhinestones dangled from one ear.

Aside from Marie and the Siouxsie and the Banshees poster on the wall behind her, our room was mostly pink. Wilson was totally out of place in it. Maybe he was nineteen or twenty, but he already looked like a fully grown man, someone who would have to shave every day. His presence in our room changed it, as if something dark and looming had cast its shadow straight into the heart of us. I wanted him gone.