It’s gone dim by the time Atlanta gets home. Sky the color of a bruised cheek. Mama’s in the garage, sitting on a cot, face lit by the little TV resting on top of a cooler. The cigarette between her two fingers has a long, crumbly ash hanging there like the head of a sleepy snake.

When she sees her daughter, her face lights up. “We got our check today.” She fishes underneath her butt, pulls out an envelope, waggles it around. Then she notices: “Oh, shoot, this is the power bill. Gosh-dang PP&L, they didn’t even read the meter last month. They just estimated a bunch of nonsense. Thieves, I’m telling you. And it’s legal. But we did get our check.”

“Super,” Atlanta says, not meaning it. She moves to head inside.

“It’s funny,” Mama says a little too loudly. “I remember we’d go to the bank, you and I, and you used to love those little lollipops they had in a fishbowl by the counter. Like you were addicted to ’em. You wanted the blue ones, always the blue ones. I don’t even know what they tasted like. Wasn’t blueberry. I don’t think anything in nature tastes like that, so I called ’em ‘Windex Pops,’ but Lords-a-mercy, if they didn’t have any Windex Pops in the bowl you would go unhinged, so one time—”

“Great story, but I don’t care,” Atlanta says.

Her mother’s face falls like a lightning-struck kite. “I’m just saying, I need to go to the bank to cash this. I thought you and me could hop in the Oldsmobile and go into town. Maybe check out the consignment store. Been wantin’ a new mixer. I thought maybe I’d sell baked goods—”

“Here’s an idea. Get a real job and then we don’t need to rely on you getting money from the state. What a crazy idea.”

Atlanta goes inside, ignoring her mother’s stunned, stung face. She slams the door and pops two Adderall soon as she’s in her room.

The Adderall is good. Real good. The high has no jagged edges. And it does the opposite of those anti-whatever pills they gave her at Emerald Lakes. Those little doodads, each the shape of a baseball home plate, each the color of Pepto-Bismol, softened everything. Life through a pair of Vaseline-smeared glasses. It took the pain and smothered it under a downy mattress.

The Adderall takes the pain and straight up ignores it. It makes all the other shit going on so much more interesting. It kills the wasp by removing its stinger.