She’d been scared of the whole idea of lookin’ at a dead man, so she’d hung back, as far away from the body as she could. Just getting her first period the day before and feelin’ sick and tired didn’t help none. That was when she spotted the old Indian woman in a beaded one-piece dress starin’ at her from across the room. She had eyes black as a bird’s and hair like Semelee’s, but also the wrinkles to go with it. She remembered how the old lady’d come close and sniffed her. Semelee’d shrunk back, scared, embarrassed. Did her period smell?

The old woman’d nodded and showed her gums in a toothless smile. “You wait right here, child,” she’d whispered. “I’ve got something for you.”

And then she’d gone away. Semelee’d hoped she wouldn’t come back but she did. And when she did she came carryin’ two black freshwater clam shells. They’d been drilled through near their hinges and was strung on a leather thong.

She took Semelee’s hand, pried open her tight-clenched fingers, and pressed the shells into her palms. “You got the sight, child. But it’s no good without these. You take them and keep them close. Always keep them close. You’ll need them when you’re ready, and you’ll be ready soon.”

Then she’d walked away.

Semelee’s first thought had been to throw them away, but she changed her mind. Nobody hardly ever gave her anything, so she kept them. She didn’t know what the old lady had been talkin’ about—”You got the sight,” and all that—but it made her feel special. Till that time in her life she’d never run into nothin’ that had made her feel special. As for “the sight”…maybe someday she’d find out what that meant.

And one day she did find out. And it had changed her life.

“Now just relax, Semelee,” Luke was sayin’. “It’s got to be somewheres. Probably fell out while you was sittin’ in the truck. We’ll find it.”

“We got to!”

She needed those eye-shells to do her magic. She’d kept them slung around her neck so’s they’d never be away from her. But now…

Those eye-shells’d saved her life…or rather, stopped her from killing herself.

It had been a day, a Tuesday in May in her sixteenth year, when everything that could go wrong did. She’d tried new hair dye the night before. Every other one she’d ever tried in the past—and she’d tried them all—didn’t take. The dye just ran off her hair like water off wax. This one was touted as different, and promised to turn her hair a luxurious chestnut brown. And it looked like it might work. It didn’t run off like the others.