‘Can we see that?’ she asked her mother, pointing to the billboard.

‘No way.’

‘Look. It starts in twenty minutes. Please.’

‘I’ve got milk here.’ Nora raised one of the bags from the IGA and gave it an angry little rustle.

‘I really want to see this.’

Bag still held aloft, Nora hesitated. Frowned. Anouk knew she had almost won. ‘We don’t have your Creon. So. No snacks,’ she said, and told Anouk to wait while she put the groceries in the car.

Anouk stood under the shade of an awning and kicked off her flip-flop, and poked at a concave piece of glass on the sidewalk with her bare toe. August heat. No wind. Anouk’s hair, the deep and layered orange of pottery glaze, was tied back in a long braid. Not a strand moved. The rev of a cicada rose, sawed the air, crescendoed and faded. She imagined that, if you could see this sound, it would spiral tightly into the air like a spark from a campfire, then burst and fizzle and disappear. She ground the glass into the pavement with her toe. On her foot, a black and sweaty band of dirt between her big toe and the next from where her flip-flop rubbed all summer long.

‘What are you doing?’ A lazy call from across the street.

Anouk looked up. It was Maggie, a girl from school, standing there holding a leash. At the other end of the leash, a small, wiry black dog pissed against a tree.

‘Going to a movie.’

Maggie, bug-eyed, glanced briefly at the billboard. ‘Seen it.’

Anouk shrugged.

‘Aren’t you going with anyone?’

‘My mom.’

Maggie rolled her bulbous eyes. Rolled them so hard it was a miracle they didn’t pop out of their sockets and land in the gutter. Her dog shook his leg and spun about to sniff his own piss, then dragged at the leash, and Maggie carried on down the road.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ Anouk whispered.

Almost home, after the movie, Nora pulled off the paved road and on to the dirt track that rolled through the woods to their house. She stopped the car. Without discussion, she and Anouk got out and switched seats. Anouk put the car in gear and slowly drove, neck stretched to see out of the window. The woods here, delicate and mixed: thin-trunked maple saplings and jaunty, soft-needled pines. Silver birch trees peeling curls of papery bark to reveal salmon-pink flesh underneath. Anouk crept along the track, not wanting to kill a rabbit, a mouse. Not wanting to kill a garter snake or chipmunk or anything else. Halfway home, she stopped the car with a jolt and pointed out an oasis of sunlight a few metres into the woods, where a colony of buttercups grew in a patch of grass.

‘Pretty,’ she said.

‘Come on. I need to get this milk in the fridge.’

At home, Anouk helped Nora set up the wasp trap. They poured cola into the tray at its base and hung the trap from a hook screwed into the top of the porch overhang. The trap was punctured with funnelled holes that tapered towards the inside of the dome. The idea was that the wasps would fly into the holes, attracted by the sugar in the cola and, once inside, wouldn’t be able to get back out.