But she can tell they didn’t touch her.

No, this is not pretty.

She tilts her head once more. Tries to shake these thoughts out.

“I got bad news for you, Tam,” Felicia says, the cemetery gravel crunching beneath her shoes. “I don’t think head-fakes work on bad thoughts.”

The problem, Natasha said, the whole team on their backs in the dark, the night before the big game, is that once one friend starts thinking about her, they all do.

By then, some of the ballers were asleep.

That makes no sense at all, Dana said.

But it does, Natasha said. Because if one friend thinks about Daphne too much, then Daphne comes and gets her, right? And so, once the one friend has been got…

Got? Dana asked. You’re fucking nuts, Nat.

Once one friend is killed, Natasha said, the others start thinking maybe Daphne did it. See?

If that was true, then the whole world would be thinking about her, Melanie said.

And all the ballers felt like they had been thinking about her. Or, rather, not thinking about her. Their entire lives.

What might someone call the opposite of déjà vu? A sense of having intentionally not been there before.

Not true, Natasha said. Daphne works faster than the spread of her story. Because pretty soon people catch on.

To what? Kit asked.

To the fact that they better shut up about Daphne.

“Kit,” Dad says, waving a hand across the kitchen table. “You get too much sun today?”

“Jesus,” Kit says. “You guys seriously need to stop asking me if I’m okay.”

Mom and Dad exchange a look.

“Okay,” Dad says. But he doesn’t let it go. “Now we’re the bad guys for noticing you’ve been staring into space for five minutes?”

“You’re thinking about something,” Mom says. “Have you entered a drug phase we need to know about? It’s okay. But tell us.”

It’s funny, but it’s not. Mom’s funny, but Kit’s not in the mood. Mom knows Kit and her friends well. Mom is cool. So is Dad. Yet what she’s asking is real. Like: What’s up with you and your friends?

“We were out by the creek,” Kit says. “Hot day. I’m tired.”

“It rained,” Dad says.

Mom’s cellphone rattles on the kitchen counter.

“So, sue me,” Kit says. She rolls her eyes but when she looks back to Dad, he’s smiling. These two, their fights don’t last.

The phone rattles on the counter.

“Not getting that,” Mom says. “Hate that phone.”

She says this a lot.

“Dad,” Kit says, “what’s kiss makeup?”

“Kiss and make up?”

“No…maybe?”

Natasha said Daphne wore kiss makeup.

“It’s just a phrase,” Dad says.

Mom’s phone rings again.

“Man, do I miss the days before cellphones,” she says. “Know what we used to do? We’d say, ‘Hey, I’ll see you Thursday at seven,’ and then wow, we saw them Thursday at seven.” Then, to Kit, “Do you mean the band?”