Dad goes to Mom’s phone, scrolls through the numbers. Calls someone.

As he begins talking, asking questions that sound like impossible riddles to Kit, Kit reaches her own phone in the living room. There are seventeen missed texts. She knows what they’re all about. Yet, through the dizziness of this news, the horror of imagining a teammate’s face smashed in, she cares less about what Dana and the others have written and much more about the fact that the heat has reached her ears.

Is she short of breath? She might be. She might need to do one or more of the many routines she’s learned through the years. Breathing in for four and out for three is one. So is standing in a doorjamb and pressing both palms out as hard as she can, using all her strength. So is walking up and down the block. Should Kit walk up and down the block? Out there in the big world where someone lives and breathes, someone who just came through Tammy Jones’s window and bashed her freshman face in?

“This is so bad,” Kit says. “So, so bad.”

Dad’s voice rises in the kitchen. Mom is talking to someone too. Is there a third voice? Are they using speakerphone? Jesus, it feels like all of reality, the parts people take for granted, are gone.

“The police have to have more to say than that,” Dad says. He sounds pissed. It’s heavier, darker than scared.

“Jason,” Mom says. “It just happened.”

“Yeah, well…” He looks across the room to Kit and Kit looks away. She can’t stand the terror in his eyes. The fear for his own daughter’s safety.

Weren’t they just looking up a rock band from the ’70s? Grown men in makeup? Weren’t they just having a moment?

KISS makeup.

But all eyes and tongues.

Yes, Kit recalls what Natasha said. Of course she does. It’s all she can focus on. You think about her, she comes. And once one friend conjures Daphne, the others can’t stop thinking about her coming for them.

Out of earshot of her parents, she tells herself, “You weren’t the only one who was thinking about her.”

The thought is almost too complex to consider. And somehow it belittles Tammy Jones. Renders her part of a dumb myth.

But Kit can’t stop herself from imagining Tammy Jones as the first domino. Falling.

She remembers a documentary she watched about mushrooms. How mushrooms actually think, like people, how they send signals to each other, an underground communication.

She imagines the way she feels, right now, sees it traveling to Dana. To Natasha. To Emily Holt.

“Tammy’s just the first,” she says.

Is this what Kit really thinks?

She sits quick on the couch. Feels like she could implode with the anxiety that’s coming. But is it coming from within or without?

She stands up again.

She tries to find the ice water she felt at the free-throw line.

But it’s not there. And it never was.