That night Mama says, “Atlanta, you want for me to go out and get some dinner? I’m fixin’ to eat, darling, and we still haven’t tried any of those . . . whatever they call those sausages.”

She means kielbasa. Polish sausage. Lots of spice. This place is a big Polish area. Not just Polish, either. Lithuanian. Hungarian. Ukrainian. That means at all the diners you can get blinis and koshie and pierogies and pickled pigs’ feet and all that good stuff. But the king is kielbasa. You go into town, you’ll find three kielbasa shops within walking distance of one another. All run by old families, each with its own recipe, each with its own little old babushka-wearing ladies in the kitchen. It’s not a competition. They encourage you to try each one. The area doesn’t have much by way of tourism, but foodies come up now and again from Wilkes-Barre or Scranton or even Philly and New York just for the kielbasa.

Sausage tourism.

Being up north is weird, Atlanta thinks. Still, she’s feeling—what’s the word? Magnanimous. She tells Mama, sure. Go for it. Bring back some kielbasa. Which she does. They both eat the sausages—bright red from the paprika within—in silence, and when they’re done, they go their separate ways. It’s their first meal together in a long time.

It’s nine at night when her head hits the pillow. No Adderall. She thinks, Don’t need it, feel pretty good, fuck it. Sleep comes fast. Rushes up on her like a tractor trailer.

She goes down like a dog under a tire.

It’s three in the morning when she wakes up to find Skinny Skank standing next to her bed.

Baton in hand.

Oh, shit.

She scrabbles to stand, but Skank has a hand over her mouth, and she shushes her. “Shhh, girl. Shhh. Don’t cry out. Don’t call for your mother. Don’t wanna have to hurt her.”

Skinny Skank teases along the hem of Atlanta’s cutoff sweat pants, then runs the tip of the baton up the inside of her thigh and along the naked skin. Everywhere the baton touches feels like fire ants biting, and suddenly Atlanta is dizzy and sick and afraid in the way you get at the top of a too-tall roller-coaster peak, the fear of falling fast, the secret thrill of what’s coming.

“I’ve been wanting to do this for a while,” Skank says, smiling like she’s doing Atlanta some kind of damn favor. “I think you’ve wanted it, too.”

She thrusts the baton harder, and Atlanta gasps, her spine bowing so hard she feels it might snap—