She ignored my question, just kept marching forward, her new blond hair bouncing, the sign jammed into her armpit. I had to rush to keep up. One of Gloria’s steps was two of mine. We went further and further into the woods.

“This is just dumb!” I yelled. “Someone’s supposed to see me, aren’t they?”

She snickered, said over her shoulder, “You know, lots of wolves live in here.” Her voice was cheerful.

I laughed. “I’m thirteen, Gloria. That dumb stuff doesn’t scare me anymore.”

She swept past branches and stomped over mossy logs. Gloria had thick legs. “Telly almost caught one once. Enormous ugly thing. Fur all stuck down. They like to hunt when it’s dark.”

“So?” I said.

“Green eyes show up first. Then you hear them sniffing and scratching.”

“Oh.” A squirt of sickness shot through my guts. Around me the shadows were long and narrow.

After a lot of walking, Gloria stopped. The trees had grown thicker and the ground was spongy under my feet. She turned in a slow circle, then lifted the sign. Dug a nail from her pocket and fixed it to a trunk. Three hard slams with the hammer. “Stand there,” she said.

“There?”

“That’s what I said, didn’t I? Under your sign.”

I didn’t understand why we were in the woods. Weeks ago, Gloria told us about a girl she saw outside the front door of Stafford’s department store. Apparently, the kid had taken a baby soother because her brother was crying. As punishment, her mother taped construction paper to her T-shirt with a message that read, “Do not trust me. I rob stuff.” I thought Gloria was going to do the same thing. So the neighbors could gawk. “This doesn’t make sense. Nobody lives in here.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s just trees, Gloria. And squirrels.”

She looked me right in the eye. “Wait and see, mister,” she said. “No-body don’t mean no-thing. Try not to breathe when you hear one of them. They’ll smell you a mile away.”

Then she left me standing under the sign. She wound her way back through the trees, and I could hear her humming a tune. The notes of her music vanished just seconds before she did.

I stood there, waiting. My stomach groaned. It had to be dinnertime by now. Gloria was probably cooking noodles or heating up a can of soup. Any moment, she’d be back. She’d find me exactly where I was and realize I wasn’t bothered one bit. And who’d win then? Wolves? What a joke.