But still, passing the fabled restaurant, she does wonder if one day she’ll be the toast of the town. Scoring, what, thirty a game by the time she’s a senior? Twenty-nine-point-six almost has a better ring to it. Like she could’ve scored thirty, but she likes to pass it too.

“Think they allow shorts and sneakers?” Felicia asks. She’s wearing neither. But Tammy is.

“They should,” Tammy says. “If I ran a place? The more the merrier.”

“Let ’em bring in their own kitchen table to eat at,” Marnie says.

“No,” Felicia says. “The living-room couch!”

They laugh. They’re fourteen. It’s cool to poke fun at adults, even as adulthood creeps up on them like ghosts.

Ghosts?

The name Daphne crosses Tammy’s mind. She shakes her head, or rather, she tilts her head to the side, like the letters could fall out her ear.

“What’s up?” Marnie asks. “You did that thing you do.”

“What’s that?”

“You had an idea that sucked.”

“Yeah, well.” Tammy makes to play it cool. But why? She grew up on Crain Street with these two. She sharpened her mind, her eye, and her mind’s eye with these two. Tell them: “You know that older girl Natasha Manska? Strong. Dirty blond?”

“No,” Marnie says.

“Yeah,” Felicia says. “Funny girl.”

“Yep. And that’s just it. She was trying to scare the hell out of all us ballers at that sleepover. Told us some spooky stuff.”

“Like what?”

Up ahead, Dawn Pawn. The girls know it’s named after the woman who owns it.

“Con Pawn, more like it,” Tammy says.

“Yawn Pawn,” Marnie says.

“What was the story?” Felicia asks. “Come on, don’t hold out.”

“Oh,” Tammy says. She tilts her head again. But the name doesn’t fall out. “Just stupid stuff. Ghosts and…whatever.”

But her friends are already uninterested. It’s not really their thing; ghosts and horror. There were some kids in middle who swore by it. But Tammy, Felicia, and Marnie are more into music than they are monsters.

To them, the graveyard in the center of Samhattan is just a shortcut on the way across town.

They head that way now.

“I like those girls, though,” Tammy says. She’s talking about the team. “They take it seriously. I like that. I can learn a lot from them.”

“Even as they learn from you,” Marnie says.

“Now you sound like my dad.”

“Well, maybe I am your dad.”

They laugh as they cross the street. Farther south, smoke billows from the dual factories, both surrounded by chain-link fences and boom barriers requiring ID. The bricks on the buildings downtown are off-white, bordering on gray. With the gray Michigan clouds, downtown is uniform, not unlike the horizon where an ocean meets the sky. Only here it feels finite. Like the muted color doesn’t go on forever, only as far as Samhattan. And for the people who work in those factories (and line up every morning with their IDs to prove they do), the color seems to follow them home.