I found him, too, with my fingers. I found his hair. Then his neck. Then his arms. But when I tried to yank, handfuls of him came off and I could feel it floating past me, touching me. “Don’t give up,” he yelled. “I’m here, Turtle!”

Then I woke up crying and choking on pretend water. Gloria rushed in. She gave me an extra spoonful of green medicine because she said it was hard to tell when I might catch a cough.

I didn’t dream no more after I swallowed that.

—

“Just stay in the backyard,” Aunt Erma said the next day. “Okay, girls? I’m having the carpets shampooed. And I can’t have you tracking in dirt.” Then she smiled at me. “I don’t mean you, Maisy, sweetheart. I know you’d never do that.”

Aunt Erma closed the back door and I heard the roar of a cleaning machine.

“Not you, sweetheart,” Shar said in a mean way. “You’d never do that.”

I went over to the sandbox with the fallen-down sides and started digging with a plastic shovel. Gloria was gone to work again. I asked her not to work as long as yesterday but she said it wasn’t up to her. “Besides, they’re not pushing me. The girls are being real supportive. It helps screw my head on right.” I dug some more. I tried to make a castle with the sand, but it kept rolling down the sides.

“I saw Mrs. Spooner’s cats poo in there,” Shar said.

“Oh,” I said, and I put down the shovel.

“It’s so lame out here.” Shar twisted around.

I picked up a tangled-up rope from the ground. “We could do a skipping contest.”

“Hardly. I’m too old for that.” Then Shar was flapping her hands all over the place. “I know what we can do,” she said. “Let’s go see the spot. The exact spot where Rowan was grabbed.”

“He wasn’t grabbed,” I said.

“How d’you know?”

I didn’t know. “We’re not allowed in there anyway.”

“Yeah? Says who?”

“Aunt Erma. She told us to stay in the yard.”

“Well my mother said Aunt Erma’s not the boss of me, and I shouldn’t forget it.”

“Well, I don’t know how to get there.” I’d only ever gone that far in the woods with Rowan.

“I do. Me and Darrell went a bunch of times.”

“Really?”

“No, not really. But so what?”

My heart was thumping. “I don’t want to go. I want to skip.”

“You’re just a scaredy cat, scaredy cat.” She was singing.

“Am not scared.”

“Is too.”

“Am not.”

“Well I’m going.”

Shar opened up the gate and she was stomping down the circle to my house without even looking back. I went behind her, and she kept going down our driveway and across our grass. “Wait up,” I said.

“You hurry up.”