My middle growled. My throat hurt, too. I opened the bottle and took a tiny sip of the green vitamins. It was hard to read the book because my head was making the words skip all over. My imagination kept doing something bad. My awful habit wouldn’t stop. I kept remembering those fingers in the basement. But I wasn’t even in the basement. I only went to the shed and hit my head and fell asleep with Chicken.

I put the book down. I took another tiny sip of the green vitamins.

It was okay to get out of bed. “Not one toe,” Gloria said. I think she said it but maybe I made that up too. My head was so cloudy. It was full of ideas and bits of a terrible movie. The fingers were sneaking out from under the door of Telly’s bathroom. Chicken was there too. He was whining like crazy. I didn’t see no surprise.

I pushed my head back into my pillow. I wanted to taste more of the vitamins. But I didn’t think I should.

Gloria said, “Not one toe.” I didn’t know what that meant. I had a lot of toes. I looked out the window again. There was nobody in the circle. I pushed back my covers and put on my bathrobe. My middle growled again. She probably meant I could get something to eat. “Not one toe” was allowed to go outside. I wasn’t allowed to go into the backyard. Or go into the woods. I shouldn’t go into the shed. Or back to Shar’s.

The hallway was quiet. I tried to go to the stairs but my feet walked into Gloria’s room instead. I looked at Gloria’s night table for a long time and then I pulled open the top drawer. It had magazines and candy bars, but no key. Then I looked in Telly’s night table. Just pennies and nickels and a blue bottle with a ship on it. I looked under Gloria’s bed. Then in her closet. There was a small box almost falling off the shelf. I brought a chair over and lifted it down and put it on her bed. I took off the lid and there were more bottles of green vitamins inside and some folded-up papers maybe from the bank. And there was a key. I knew it was the key for the basement. Maybe if I checked for the fingers and they weren’t there then the movie would fly out of my head. Some of the lies would be gone. Then when Gloria read my mind, she’d see better things.