The spider, or one like it, is on her leg.

She can’t cover her mouth this time.

“Get the fuck off me!”

She kicks at it and it rolls, actually rolls across the attic floor.

Dana moves fast, quiet, out the window and onto the roof.

Below: the squad car. But as far as she can tell, there’s nobody behind the wheel. And nobody in the passenger seat.

She lies flat to the shingles and inches her way to the edge. She doesn’t plan to use a gutter and there is no latticework, but pull-ups aren’t the only thing Coach Wanda always insists on and Dana has never been more grateful for the billion exercises that strengthen the ballers’ ankles.

When she gets to the edge, she looks down, sees it’s far, sees also the living-room window she’d surely land in front of.

How does one get out of a house full of police officers and parents?

How did Kit?

But she knows how Kit did it. And it makes her smile, and almost cry, thinking of the basement bathroom door that leads to the yard.

She army-crawls across the shingles toward the backyard, her belly grating against the ridge running alongside the length of the house. When she reaches the back, she sees the officer below. As expected.

She waits. She listens. No movement or voices from inside. Nobody asking where she is.

Okay.

She crawls to the front of the house again, looks down, sees two officers in a cruiser parked almost in front of the neighbor’s home. They’re facing the other direction, up the street. She recognizes them as two who had spent some time inside the house.

She thinks: Whenever she walked to the foyer to look out the front windows, the officers were seated on the couch in the living room, their backs to the glass. As if they assumed the men and women in the cruisers had their eyes on the front door. And the officers outside? They were all looking up the street, yes. Looking for who might be coming.

That means…no eyes on the front door.

And none on the front windows either.

Possibly.

Without allowing herself too much time to think, Dana swings her legs over the roof’s edge, counts to three, hears Coach Wanda shouting about how no baller can play without her ankles, and drops.

She lands in a perfect semi-crouch, with her back to the front windows.

She looks to the house. Looks to the squad cars.

Wasting no time, she begins walking up the sidewalk. She’ll pass one of the cruisers, but maybe, maybe, if she carries herself the right way, they’ll assume she’s a neighbor. How well do they all know what she looks like? She doesn’t know who is in this car, whether or not she met them. Do they expect a young woman dressed in jeans and a Doors T-shirt to be one of the starters for the Samhattan High School girls’ basketball team? Would they recognize her as an athlete?