The guy behind me lays on his horn: the light has turned green. I press the gas pedal just a little too hard and shoot forward into the intersection. When a familiar orange sign flashes in my peripheral vision, I signal to turn without thinking and swerve into the parking lot of the Donut Hole—this, like the drive-in movie theater, is totally unchanged.

I turn off the ignition. Sit in silence. After just a few seconds of no air-conditioning, it’s painfully hot. It must be eighty degrees—much warmer than it was in Chicago. The air is chokingly heavy with moisture. I wrestle off my leather jacket and grab my purse from the floor of the passenger seat. I could use a water.

As I’m opening the car door, a blue Subaru pulls up next to me, jamming its brakes at the last second and making me jump. The driver honks twice.

I slide out of the car, annoyed by how close the other driver has parked, and then notice the woman in the car is smiling at me and giving a frenzied, two-handed wave. She motions toward the Donut Hole and I have a split second to decide if I should turn back toward Chicago and forget this whole thing. But suddenly I am paralyzed. Somewhere along the line, my fight-or-flight instinct turned into freeze, turn invisible, wait for it to pass.

Misha Dale. Blonder, heavier, still beautiful, in her small-town way. Smiling. I used to dream of her smile—the way, I imagine, bottom-feeding fish must dream of the long dark funnel of a shark’s throat.

Misha at twelve: getting all her friends to pelt me with stale lunch rolls when I walked through the cafeteria. Misha at fourteen: planting an animal femur in my locker, claiming it was one of my mother’s bones, whispering that I kept body parts in my freezer, a rumor that achieved such aggressive popularity that Sheriff Kahn came over to check. At fifteen, she organized a campaign to raise money for the treatment of my acne. At sixteen, she circulated an online petition to have me suspended from school.

A sadist with a beautiful smile. She, Cora Allen, Annie Baum, and Kaycee Mitchell fed on me for years, grew fat and strong on my misery, ecstatic when junior year I tried to swallow half a bottle of Advil and had to spend a week at Mercy mental hospital—something my father refused to ever acknowledge and of which we have never spoken.

Next time, I’ll help, Misha whispered to me in the hall when I finally got back to school.

Terrible girls. Demonic.

And yet, I’d envied them.

—

“I don’t believe it. I heard you might be coming back.” Her eyes have softened but her smile is the same—sharp, and slightly crooked. “And your car! Lord knows you’ve done well.” She folds me briefly into a one-armed hug. She smells like cigarettes—menthol—and the heavy perfume used to mask them. “Don’t you remember me? It’s Misha Jennings. Dale,” she corrects herself, shaking her head. “You’d know me as Dale. My Lord, it’s been a long time.”