If the keys were in the car, she thinks, quickly checking the floor and visor to make sure they’re not, she might drive away. She doesn’t know exactly where she would go, because she doesn’t really know how to get anywhere from here, but she’d go, following the roads wherever they took her. She reclines her seat all the way and stares at the drooping red fabric of the ceiling, from which still hang two sticky-bottomed caterpillars hatched from the plastic egg of a grocery store vending machine and attached there by Isabelle and her friend Phoebe two summers ago, when the car was a place where they played regularly. They’d roll down the front windows all the way and sit on the door with their legs inside, their bodies out, face-to-face across the roof of the car, where they’d set out their lemonades and plates of Fluffernutter sandwiches. Other times, when it was raining, they’d just sit in the car and read. One time, they’d even had a sleepover in the car. They’d flattened out the backseat and slept there, though they could just as well have reclined the front seats, Isabelle thinks now, and she wonders why they hadn’t thought of that. It might have been more comfortable.

She sits up and tugs on one of the caterpillars, testing to see how stuck it is. To her surprise, it peels easily away from the ceiling’s upholstery, and as she looks at the furry thing in her hand, she is filled with regret. She liked the fact that those caterpillars had been stuck there for so long, like bookmarks in time marking the days of a good friendship, or like placeholders, as if sometime, next summer, maybe, she and Phoebe could jump back in where they left off. She had seen Phoebe only once this past summer, in passing at the Fourth of July parade when they’d first arrived in Massachusetts for the summer. Even now she can feel her mother’s hand steering her through the crowd in Phoebe’s direction, can see Phoebe in her red-and-white-striped shirt, her blue shorts, her stubbornly downward gaze. Isabelle had known immediately that Phoebe’s shyness wasn’t the usual, temporary shyness of a winter’s separation, but a different shyness—the shyness of not knowing what to say or do—and she’d known that her silence had preceded her, that she had no chance. We’ve heard you had a hard year, Isabelle, Phoebe’s mother had said, and Isabelle had wanted to melt. She was not Isabelle anymore, even here where she hadn’t been in a year; she was the silent one.