I swiped my hand back and forth under the seat, crumbs and rough carpet sliding against my palm, a few pencils, crumpled soda straws. I came across a lighter.

Was this Sawyer’s or from the previous renter of the car?

Good parents in this day and age did not let smoking cigarettes go unchecked. Then again, considering all the horrific things a sixteen-year-old boy could do, smoking cigarettes seemed to be a meditative, intelligent choice.

My phone buzzed with a text. Lucky timing.

The screen lit up, revealing its location further back. I grabbed it and laid across the backseat. Trevor.

-What are you up to?

-Just got back from donuts and ice cream. Call me later.

A horn honked three times, loud and close. I raised my head.

No car in my driveway, but a Ford pickup idled near our mailbox. Sawyer ran across the lawn and, in one graceful swoop, laid his right hand down on the edge of the truck bed and swung his legs to the left like a gymnast on the pommel horse.

Grace failed him on the landing. He tumbled into the back of the pickup, and the two kids in the front cab laughed, their voices free and masculine, reminding me of my brothers. A nervous butterfly flit in my stomach. Something about a deep, conspiratorial, masculine laugh was forever frightening.

Sawyer’s head popped up, a sly grin on his face that I’d never seen.

The truck’s tires squealed, and it shot down the street toward the main road. Behind the cab window, a gun rack, rifles mounted horizontally.

How had he made friends so quickly? It was the first day of school.

I grabbed the bag of donuts from the dashboard and headed around the side of the house. “Emily?” I called, the neighbor’s cougars coming to mind again.

“Back here,” she said softly. Her voice was coming from beyond a cluster of overgrown lilac bushes.

I peeked around the lilacs. The late afternoon sun highlighted the back of her hair, setting it ablaze. She was sitting in the grass, gathering bouquets of dandelions.

The tangle of lilacs partially sheltered her head like a fort. The image stirred a strange sense of déjà vu, something from my childhood. A little girl, my age, just in front of me, pushing through an arcing tangle of mulberry bushes. Our fort. The passageway laden with juicy berries, and the dirt was dotted with blackish purple stains. The mulberry bush passage ended at a shallow creek where we’d laid a two-by-four as a bridge. Along the wet, rotting sides of the wood plank, tiny spirals of snails clung. A boy, two or three years old, sat in the dirt, putting a snail in his mouth.

“Yuck,” I’d said, wiping at my own tongue as if I had something there. “Don’t eat that. Yuck.”

The boy mimicked me, wiping the snail away.