Fine. She goes downstairs and nukes a cup of instant coffee. It tastes like dirt from the bottom of a workman’s boot, but it’s hot and it’s caffeine. Just to be sure, she drinks three more cups before the sun comes up.

When it does, she’s not sure what to do with herself. She washes some of the dishes in the sink. Makes herself breakfast, which is really just ramen noodles—the ambiguously named “Oriental” flavor, which she suspects tastes less like anything Oriental and more like soy sauce. Ramen noodles have been a breakfast staple of hers for years, on all those many days when her mother did not come down to make anything. Cheap. Easy. Oddly comforting to an anxious stomach before another day at high-school hell.

As she’s slurping noodles, she hears footsteps upstairs. Then a toilet flush. Then footsteps back to bed. Atlanta almost misses having the run of the house. Since the woman moved back in upstairs, Atlanta’s reminded how much noise Mama makes.

Atlanta sits and finishes her noodles. Putters around. Feels useless. Like a pair of fake nuts hanging from the back of a pickup truck—ornamental, stupid, a worthless decoration.

It’s an hour later when the phone rings.

“It’s on,” Guy says. “They got a fight next week. We’re in.”

Atlanta’s heart plummets through the floor like an elevator.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

They call it a farmers’ market, but it’s no such thing. It’s a dirt mall—a big, concrete rectangle with stall after stall smashed together in a big U-shape. They have farm stuff, sure. Amish sell jams, jellies, jars of chowchow, red-beet eggs, pickled everything. A few stalls compete for produce—curiously, little of it is actually local. But then you have the homely, elderly twins who sell old electronics and appliances—tape decks, decrepit vacuums and vacuum parts, old RC cars. Or the pet-food store that has a live alligator in the back that they like to show off (his name’s Arthur). Or the butcher counter whose meats smell a little too sweet, a little too sour, like they’re on the edge of going south if they haven’t already. And the food stalls: everything from fried chicken to Cuban sandwiches to Kenyan food to sugar-crusted elephant ears big enough to use as a trash can lid. Food smells mingle together with body odors to make a confusing olfactory experience.

Shane travels behind Atlanta, ogling and oohing.

“You really never been here before?” she asks.

“Huh?” Shaken from his reverie.

“I said, you’ve never been here before?”

“Nuh-uh. No. I just thought it was . . . I dunno, a farmers’ market.”

“Name’s kinda misleading.”