Is she having a heart attack in front of her parents?

“Call 911,” she says.

Because she’s dying. Of course. Because this must be what dying feels like.

Hello, girl…

…Daphne is on her way.

Involuntarily, Kit remembers a thing she read about dogs, how some are embarrassed to die in front of their owners. Some run away when they know it’s the end. But they don’t run from death. They run from becoming the spectacle. From the indignity of death before witnesses.

Mom is now searching the closets, searching the halls.

Kit can’t move. Can’t make a decision. Keeps hearing the man saying Daphne’s name.

Then Mom is back in the doorjamb.

“Do you smell that?” she asks. Then, “Smoke.”

And Kit thinks of Natasha’s story. Thinks of Daphne in denim, dead behind the wheel of her muscle car.

“He’s not the killer,” she says. Her voice doesn’t sound like her own. Sounds like an older woman, a woman who’s been through more than any teenager deserves.

“They got him,” Dad says. But Kit sees it. As Mom and Dad exchange a glance. Uncertainty there. They want it to be true. They want it.

Kit wants it too.

But there are too many thoughts, too many feelings, to believe a single one.

“He wanted to see Daphne,” Kit says. “He wanted to watch her kill me.”

Her mind’s in pieces: the man from beneath her bed in the bleachers, Daphne strangling people midcourt. The smell of the man in her room. The bald head beneath the bed, in her hands, as she shoots, as she asks the rim a question.

“Is Daphne going to kill me…”

Daphne with the ball down low. The orange of the ball against the blue of her jeans. Daphne doesn’t turn and shoot, doesn’t face the basket.

She crushes the ball in her bare hands.

“HE WANTED TO WATCH HER KILL ME!”

But it’s not his perversion that freezes her. It’s not even the fact that somehow he got in.

“He knows it’s going to happen,” Kit says. And her voice is the engine of an old, dying muscle car.

“No,” Dad says. Even as Mom continues to check closets, behind doors. Even behind the posters of Kit’s heroes.

Kit says, “Daphne is on her way…”

And she thinks of that perfect orange rim in the Samhattan High School gym. Thinks how no rim has ever lied to her. And that one, of all the rims in the world, never would.

“He knows, Dad…”

“No, Kit…”

“She’s on her way.”

“No.”

“He knows.”

Kennedy Lichtenstein has already graduated Samhattan High School. But because the rule for the summer basketball league is age (under eighteen) rather than high-school status, she was allowed to play with the team in the summer league after receiving her diploma. Kennedy is now eighteen years old. Her birthday is today.