Roberta found herself shielding her face with her forearms and shouting, “I’m warning you, I’ve killed a man!” at Drake and her crew. The hens were unimpressed, launching another attack on Roberta’s ankles, and she had to leap outside the ring before she got clobbered. She leaned over the fence, looking down into Drake’s dark little eyes glaring up at her like come-at-me-bitch, and Roberta had instant access to a catalogue of a few dozen ways to retaliate. Ranging from minor acts of sadism that would leave no mark to a deniable accident that would remove Drake from the pen forever. Roberta could picture them. Her hands were ready. She could teach this dumb bird, it would be easy.

A surge of nausea followed that thought, and Roberta had to sit down, in the mud, nose perilously close to the wire hexagons of the fence. Dry-heaving. Of course she was not going to hurt this chicken. That was crazy, right? She stared at Drake, who was still a ruddy bowling ball, and felt kinship with the little psycho. “Listen,” she told Drake. “I get where you’re coming from. I’ve been through some stuff, too. I just lost both parents, and I had a lot of unfinished business with them. I spent so long thinking I never wanted to speak to them again, and now that I never can, I’m realizing how wrong I was. I never even expected to outlive them; they were supposed to mourn me and feel all helpless, not the other way around. And I guess what I’m saying is: Can we be friends? I promise I won’t challenge your authority. I just want to be one of your lieutenants or something. Okay? For real.”

Drake craned her neck and unpuffed slightly. She gave Roberta a once-over, then seemed to nod slowly.

“Tell your sister,” the hen said, “she waited too long, and it’s too late.”

“What?” Roberta leapt to her feet, then tripped and fell on her ass again.

“You heard me,” Drake said. “Pass on the message. She said she needed more time to answer, we gave her more time. It’s a simple yes-or-no question, for fuck’s sake.”

“Uh.” This was it. Roberta was finally losing her mind. “Okay. I’ll, uh, tell her.”

“Good. Now give me my goddamn corn,” Drake said.

Drake never spoke to Roberta again—at least, not in English—but after that they really were sort of friends. Roberta learned how to read Drake’s moods and know when to give the alpha hen space. She knew when one of the other humans had pissed Drake off, and she would cuss him or her out on Drake’s behalf. At last, Roberta had found an authority figure she could please without hating herself.

She tried to get in touch with Patricia, but her little sister’s phone seemed permanently turned off and nobody knew where she’d gone.