And they don’t refute her either. Up close like this, it really does look like a grave for a giant. Only, less cared for. Unmarked.

“Kinda makes you wanna dig,” Marnie says.

“That’s like the Call of the Void,” Felicia says. “Like when you look over the second-floor balcony at the mall and you kinda feel like jumping.”

“Or when you’re standing at the edge of traffic,” Marnie says, “waiting for the light to change.”

“And you kinda wanna step in it,” Felicia ends the sentiment for her.

“The Call of the Void,” they both say together.

“You two,” Tammy says. She shakes her head. This time her friends think it’s because they’re talking morbid and she’s brushing them off. But that’s not it. She’s shaking her head for the same reason she did minutes ago. Because, as she looks at this thus-far-hypothetical grave, the same name pops into her head again.

Daphne.

Enough dirt here for a woman her size.

Tammy doesn’t look away. Doesn’t look over her shoulder, though the name (and the feeling, right? The clear realization that the name has been on her mind since it left Natasha Manska’s lips) sends a cold wind blowing from nowhere. Maybe it’s imagined, that wind. But some things become real when you think about them too much.

Daphne.

Why does it feel like Tammy is examining for the first time something that’s always been there? That name, heard now and again in life, but like when her parents have the TV on in the other room: faint, suppressed. Like when a friend uses a word you think you know the meaning of, but you don’t, not really, and you never think to ask.

It’s almost like Natasha was examining it for the first time, too, as she said it out loud.

“Come on,” Tammy says. “They’re gonna close.”

“Well, it’s your fault if we miss out on coffee,” Marnie says.

But they don’t really care. These three, they’re smart. They adapt. Other places in Samhattan have coffee too.

So, the girls continue toward their goal. Three lifelong friends with impending high school and entire lives to ponder. So much to pick apart, unpack, talk about. So, Felicia and Marnie do. But Tammy can’t bring herself to join in yet. With all the world to think about, she’s only got one thing on her mind.

And it’s like a worm, this thought, like when someone can’t quit the chorus of a hit song.

And it’s not pretty either.

It’s the bones of a seven-footer, buried in a back corner of a city graveyard, unmarked and uncelebrated, uncared for and ignored. And yeah, it sounded to Tammy like the woman didn’t deserve whatever she got. But it’s not exactly empathy she feels right now.

It’s fear.

Felicia takes her hand, a gesture Tammy assumes is meant to comfort her. But when she looks down, there is no hand in her own.

She stops.

“Yo,” Marnie says. “What?”

Tammy looks over her shoulders, looks everywhere, says, “Did you…”