Kennedy Lichtenstein wants to see the world in full.

Still, Hi-Fi is good to her. For now. It’s paving the way for those dreams. Giving her options. Giving her money. Money that will eventually be exchanged for a bus ticket.

But good as it’s been, Hi-Fi is also where she heard Daphne’s name for the first time since she was a kid.

In fact, she read it before she heard it. Written in black marker on the wall in the breakroom, the letters chilled her, bringing back that formerly buried memory of her mother’s serious face. She’d been up front at the registers when her co-worker Zach Gold suddenly appeared at her side, breathless, insisting she come with him. He physically pulled her by the arms, even as she tried to write this urgency off as Zach’s dramatic nature. What could be so important? Kennedy has long known Zach Gold is in love with her, which may be interesting, which may be flattering, but she has no plans of dating and there’s not a chance in Samhattan she’d settle for anything right now. She has plans, after all.

Where are you taking me? she asked.

Zach hurried her to the back of the store. He took her through the plastic saloon doors, down the concrete hall to the breakroom.

Did you see this? he said, pointing to the wall by the microwave.

Kennedy saw it then:

DAPHNE LIVES

She read it again. The way it was written, she thought maybe it was the name of a band.

Okay, she said. So?

But she’d felt it. A brief chill. That name…

This is bad, Zach said.

But the zeal with which Zach took his bagger job didn’t help his cause: it almost came off as funny.

Yeah, funny how scared he was.

Do you know who did this? he asked.

How would I know?

She saw a dark spark in his eyes then. Not only had he recognized she wasn’t taking this seriously, he saw an opportunity to explain why she should.

So, he told her the story of Daphne. And as he did, Kennedy started thinking of her mother, scolding her, after having picked her up from Meegan Elementary.

Zach’s story was long and involved and he knew details Kennedy could never have known. She’d never dreamed there was this much to know about this name, a name that had been lodged so far into her subconscious, she was surprised she recognized it at all.

And then, something unexpected: there in the breakroom, skinny Zach Gold nervously pointing to the name, talking a mile a minute about how he didn’t like it, how it shouldn’t be there, how people weren’t supposed to talk about Daphne, how people weren’t even supposed to think about her, Kennedy found herself interested in the story. She noted the careful, almost regretful tone Zach took when he got to the part about the seven-footer killing without any weapon, only using her…

Bare hands.

Kennedy looked to her own lack of hands, then thought (not for the first time) that some people took theirs for granted. If more people understood how precious their hands were, they wouldn’t do bad things with them. She studied the letters on the wall as Zach used words like “dangerous” and “crisis” and said they had to “contain” this. But Kennedy didn’t understand. Contain what? Zach was talking as if Daphne were a disease. He was sweating and his voice cracked with anxiety and his expression wasn’t so different from that of her mother’s, that day.