Going back home doesn’t sound appealing. Her mother will be making a nest out of ruined Kleenex, hatching little pity eggs like the saddest bird on the block. When the woman gets on a crying jag, it goes and it goes with all the energy of that stupid-ass battery bunny.

She wanders around town for a while. Not sure what to do next. Atlanta doesn’t know what she expected: she’d turn the corner just past that little coffee café on the corner, and there, in front of Dosie Sawicki’s kielbasa stand, she’d see some canine serial killer tying a noose around a Newfoundland’s neck? Performing dentistry on a Chihuahua? Stuffing a Jack Russell into a cannon?

In the midst of her floundering, a kielbasa starts to sound pretty dang good. Throwing up does that to you, sometimes—leaves you hollow, ragged, but feeling like you need to be filled up again. Time, then, to eat.

She goes to the counter, orders up. The Sawickis have that coal-cracker accent going on, replete with all the dialect that makes Atlanta—with her muddy Southern twang—want to bite glass. Y’wanna kilbo griller? Kilbo for kielbasa. Dincha want mustard wit dat? Come back tamarra!

And they say Southerners sound dumb. If there’s one thing Atlanta has learned, it’s that hicks are hicks. Being red-in-the-neck is a global phenomenon, and everybody sounds stupid to everybody else.

It’s Madge Sawicki behind the counter, big pink lips and cakey makeup and hair teased into a rat’s nest, all in service to staving off the rigors of midlife. She’s nice enough and wants to chat, but Atlanta’s not in a chatty mood. She just orders—yes, mustard with that, no, not spicy—and goes and sits on the once-green, now paint-flaking bench around the corner.

By the time she’s half-done eating the kielbasa—the skin with a sharp snap, the meat spicy and strange, the mustard doubly so—she takes a look at the folder sitting by her side, and suddenly the bottom drops out of her stomach and the food goes rancid in her gut. She gives it a couple minutes, but—still sour. Atlanta wads up the remains of her meal and pitches it in the metal trashcan next to the counter.

Madge waves. “Y’wanna wooder ice wit dat?” You want a water ice with that? That’s another thing regional to the area. Water ice. That’s what they called shaved ice. Water ice? What other kind of ice would there be?

She tells Madge no, then turns and sees someone across the street.

No, no, no.

Mitchell Erickson.

He sees Atlanta.

And then starts to cross the street toward her.

She’s seen him around school a few times since Chris died but always stayed out of his orbit. Never mind the fact he might’ve been involved in Chris’s murder.

Her blood boils. Her middle churns.