Sage folded the papers back up. Her fingers were black with newsprint. So were mine. “We should just ask Wilson what he did,” she said.

I didn’t want to have anything to do with Wilson. What if Barbie Man was organizing his own gang to come to Valley Forge and get revenge? Wilson’s craziness had brought us a world of trouble.

Grady knocked on the door of Sage’s bedroom and cracked it open. Sage pushed the papers under her bed, and we looked up at him in the doorway.

“Libby, Marie called. You need to head home. She said y’all are going out for her birthday. I can give you a ride,” he said. “I’m on my way out anyway.”

I sat in the front seat of Grady Adams’s Mercedes. We talked about nothing as we drove, just the weather, Marie’s move to the city. We turned down my street and pulled into our driveway. Beatrice was standing at the front of the house in a pale-yellow sundress, waving at me. I said thank you and went to pull the door handle.

“By the way, how’s Ellen doing now?” Grady looked straight at me, a serious and concerned expression on his face.

He knew.

“Oh, fine,” I said. Heat flushed my cheeks. Why hadn’t I said What do you mean? or I don’t know what you’re talking about? I’d made it sound like I knew what he meant. I couldn’t believe Sage had told him. After all we’d talked about, how she’d sworn she’d say nothing. I just thanked him again, pushed his car door shut, and walked toward Beatrice.

Upstairs, the others were stuffed into the bathroom. Ellen was brushing her hair, Thomas was brushing his teeth, Marie was up close to the mirror, applying thick black eyeliner.

“You’ll scare the Amish,” Ellen said to Marie as she added extra-thick layers of black under her eye.

“Oh God, it’s not Plain and Plenty Farm, is it?” I asked.

My mother loved Amish country. Plain & Plenty was one of those all-you-can-eat family-style dining places where they seat you at a long table with other families and serve up communal bowls of food. She liked the country style, the ordinariness, and sitting with strangers, who she seemed to like better than the people we actually knew. The other families were usually from somewhere in the middle of the state or Maryland, and conversation was always awkward. But we rarely ate together in the house, never mind go out to eat, and we were all happy to be going.

We drove down Route 30 toward Lancaster, to Pennsylvania Dutch. Thomas told us the Amish weren’t Dutch, they were German, and so, technically, it should be Pennsylvania Deutsch.

“Nerd fact,” whispered Ellen, sitting between us.