It came as an order, not a request. Summer felt rather than saw her mama tense. Sometimes she thought she could hear her mother when no one else could, feel her feelings, and she couldn’t really explain that to anyone, because it was weird. The trunk unlatched and she heard things being moved around. A few seconds later, the woman reemerged next to the driver’s-side window. She nodded to Summer in the back seat and stepped into the shed, picking up a walkie-talkie. She turned her back to them when she made the call, and Summer watched her walk back into the little shed, nod and press a button to open the gate. The two solid metal doors opened to reveal a long stretch of road.

Mama let go of the brake and the car bounced through the gate. Summer spun her head around, gripping the back of the seat with both her hands to stare out of the back window at Noodles. She was watching them.

“What a nutjob,” she said, turning back to face the front.

“Don’t say things like that. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Daddy would have thought she was.”

“Enough!” Lorraine’s voice was angry, and her eyes were worse; Summer looked away, at the sandcastle, instead. The closer they got, the less interesting it looked. She wanted to go home.

“Remember what I told you,” Mama said.

“You’ve told me a lot of things.” She could feel her mother’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but she refused to meet them. Instead, she focused her gaze outside the window and on the bumping of the car as it rolled over the battered road. The closer they got, the more disappointing the scene: dirt, more dirt and then a dusty parking lot holding eight crappy cars.

“How many people live here?”

Her mama hesitated. “About a hundred,” she said as they neared the building. “Taured bought this place right around the time I got pregnant with you.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did he buy a prison?”

“Oh.” She said it in a way that made Summer think she didn’t want to talk about it. “It fit his dream, I guess.” Lorraine turned into a parking spot next to the other cars. “When we were kids, he lived in a foster home up the street from my house. He was the only other kid on our street that was my age, so we kind of just had to play together. Anyway, this is what he’d talk about even way back then.”

“Living in a women’s prison?”

Her mother shot her a look that said she better shut up or else. “Creating a family of like-minded people.”