I nearly snapped that everyone raised without a safety net was nervous behind the eyes—that we did not have the room to be anything else—that people like Susan made us naturally nervous. “Why do you think she did it?” I asked instead.

“Oh, she was always strange…,” Susan said, waving her arms dramatically. “Especially at the end. Those things she did were so…unbecoming of an ahr-tist of her stature. I’ll never understand it. I have several of the sculptures, you know, in my collection. She used to be rational. But then—” The lines on her face deepened. Her liver-spotted hands, coated in gemstones and lacquered with polish, wrapped themselves atop my shoulders. She yanked me toward her. “Something happened to that girl,” she insisted in a low voice. “Something…bad.”

“What do you mean?” I breathed. She gripped harder. One of her many rings cut into the skin of my neck, but I didn’t care.

“She wouldn’t listen to reason. She became so…difficult,” Susan whispered. “I knew it was all wrong. And eventually, so did she.” She nodded wisely.

“What was wrong?” I asked.

“The performances,” Susan said. “That poor man,” she whispered salaciously. “He was so very in love with her. It was all so upsetting.”

“Tyler?”

Her eyes flickered. I couldn’t tell if it was from alcohol or annoyance that I actually knew something or both. “Mmm,” she said. “Not that she cared. Nervous gu-hl like that. Never saw what she had.”

Before I could squeeze anything else out of the gin-dampened sponge that was Susan’s brain, the well-preserved man who had shoved me into the wall earlier reappeared, a demon whispering in her ear. “There’s someone very important I want you to meet,” he said, loudly enough for me to hear. Then he guided Susan forward, toward my body, as though it were an open space.

This time I stepped out of the way.

*  *  *

Thoughts of Pine City overwhelmed me on the walk home, my brain obsessively running Susan’s comments on a loop. Nervous girl. Something bad. That poor man.

I imagined myself lying on the grass, bees crawling across my skin, surrounded by Tyler, Jes, Marlin, and Jack as we discussed the truth about ourselves and our work. I would talk about how hard it was, sometimes, and how I never seemed to be able to predict what would happen next. Well, one of them would say, you know what happened to Carey, right?

No, I would say. Tell me. And then—then I would know how it was all supposed to play out. I would learn what Carey did wrong, and I would take care never to do the same.