Guilt, guilt, guilt. Nibbling away at her. Every once in a while she can hear the voice of Chris Coyne in her ears, so clear it’s like he’s standing right there next to her. Are you just going to let my bones rest? Sister, color me disappointed. Gray is the color of disappointment, in case you’re looking for paint colors. Like gunmetal, that color. And here I thought you’d help me. My bad. Guess it really doesn’t get any better, does it? Somewhere outside a dog barks. Yappy little thing before it yelps and is gone. Chris clucks his tongue in her ear. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

She knows he’s not really here. It’s her own inner monologue made to sound like his. Not like a marionette but, rather, a ventriloquist’s dummy: her throwing a voice to shadows and specters.

Puppets, puppets, she thinks drowsily, we’re all puppets, puppets and puppies—an absurd thought right before she falls asleep in the final hour before the coming dawn.

Morning—well, late morning—well, let’s just call it “noon”—arrives, and Atlanta awakens in a dreary, bleary-eyed sweat. Her spirits lift a little—not a full, bounding leap, but like a balloon whose helium hasn’t gone all the way out—when she realizes that this is the first day of summer vacation. No more school. No more stupid kids. No more bullies. Just three months of sitting on her ass, watching bad daytime courtroom TV, eating cheap frozen pizzas and off-brand cereal from the Amish store, lining up cans on the post-and-rail fence out back and knocking them off with the squirrel gun. Freedom. Three months of do-nothing, think-nothing, mind-wiped, blissful teenage oblivion. Hell. Yes.

It’s then she hears something downstairs.

A gentle sobbing, as if into a pillow. Or a couch cushion.

Her mother.

“Aw, shoot,” Atlanta says. Then buries her head under her own pillow. Minutes pass. Once more she emerges—peekaboo!—and still hears the woman’s weeping. “Dangit.”

She’s going to have to check on her mother, isn’t she? The two of them have been getting along. Better. If not great. It’s not like it used to be, where she looked up to her mother and wanted to be like her; that ship has long sailed. It sailed and hit an iceberg and broke apart when her mother invited that man into their house.

The sudden stink of gunpowder screw-spirals up her nose. Another ghost. Not present. Not real. She pushes it back, then makes her way downstairs, sees her mother from behind, sitting on the couch, her lap a clumsy cairn of crumpled-up tissues.

Next to her, a torn envelope and some kind of letter.

Her mother hears Atlanta come closer. “We’re screwed,” her mother says. Another honk as she blows her nose.

“Dang,” Atlanta says, rubbing sleep boogers from the corners of her eyes. “What are you going on about?”