“Telly never should’ve left, Bids. Your dad. He really did belong here. In my house. My house. You can’t imagine how hard I worked to get this place, and all the while Telly learning how to tinker with cars. And he thinks he can take it away.”

She smiled again. But it wasn’t a happy smile this time. Or a sad-smile. I didn’t know what kind of smile it was.

“I can call Telly? I can ask him to come home, Gloria.”

“Oh, Bids. He’s made up his mind. I got to accept that, too. There’s a vicious wolf in our basement, and Rowan is drowned, and Telly’s not coming back. He was never coming back. He just played Gloria for a fool.”

A bad smell started. Smoke came out of the pot. Gloria put on an oven mitt.

“So now you and me are going to start fresh. Just totally fresh, Bids. Maybe we’ll find a little house in a new town. Some place real beautiful. After all we’ve been through, we deserve that. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t want a new town, Gloria.” My head was so confused. What was in the basement? I knew it was Rowan. He called me Turtle. Even if he’s a wolf, he’s still here. “I like Pinchkiss Circle. I like Little Sliding.”

“No, you don’t. You just think you do. You’re too young. You don’t know nothing.”

There was a lot of smoke now. The kitchen had a horrible stink.

“You need to trust me, Bids. Do you trust me? We can’t tell anyone what we were imagining. Our bad ideas about the basement. Believing we could fix something so wrong. They’d think we went crazy. You and me. We’d be pulled apart. When all we were doing was trying to hold things together. Trying to make life back like it was.”

I wanted to cry but I started to cough.

“Do you trust me?” She sounded mad.

“I trust you.”

“Okay,” she said. “Just do what I say, and everything’ll be fine.”

Then orange blasted from the pot.

I leapt up from my seat. Chicken barked and barked.

Gloria stepped back real fast. “Get ready!” she yelled. She grabbed the water glass and threw it into the pot.

Wind ripped in my ears. Fire shot up to the ceiling. Angry orange fingers went everywhere. Tearing and eating.

Hot stung my face. I screamed. The curtain was gone. Then Rowan’s FINALIST paper. I saw Jenny the Head. She was hiding on the windowsill. Her hair turned to fire and her face crumpled down to her eyeballs. I couldn’t reach her.

“Go, go, go!” Gloria grabbed my hand. “Run, Bids, run!”