In the distance, I could see roads still smooth enough for vehicles to take, the moving lines of herd animals traveling, the furry dots of tree clusters and a real forest or two, and a curious collection of decayed construction lifting above them. It took me a minute, but then I remembered why it looked familiar. It was an amusement park—there used to be places where people paid and lined up for the chance to be scared by dangerous rides and make themselves nauseated by spinning mechanics. I laughed. Oh man, what a weird place this used to be.

Eventually, the sky started to fill up with stars, so many at once it was like the Earth had moved closer to them, as if we had walked into the sky. I sat on the side of the hill and tried to count them. The distraction didn’t last. I started worrying about our food supply. About the bullets we may or may not have left. About the direction we were headed and what would be waiting there for us.

The wind kicked up, and I wrapped my arms around myself, holding everything in, keeping everything out. A star pulled itself from the others and arced across the sky like a gesture of direction. And I was brought back here, to the place where this is what mattered: the people up the hill, the truth locked under my ribs, the very stars shifting and holding still at the same time.

I was warm and I was breathing, and that was enough for now.

EPILOGUE/PROLOGUE:

THE GIRL WHO WOULD BE LOUD

Rose

NIGHT WAS PEELING BACK FROM SKY, REVEALING thinner layers and gauzy light as it went. Rose couldn’t sleep. Out here, the grass swam with whistling insects, was pushed down by quiet paws. The sky was too big, too vast, too much space to get lost in. Nothing was holding her down except the weight of a boy’s arm, the warmth of a boy’s love, and those, too, could be too much. She slid out of French’s sleeping embrace and crawled outside the circle. She stood and walked into the thick of the field, so riotous she could hear it working pulpy braids into the abandoned agriculture.

In the distance, the bones of an old amusement park scratched the horizon with splintered loops and creaking chairs held together with climbing vines where the rust had broken them free. If she closed her eyes, she could hear the echoes of excited screams and old laughter caught up in the wind. There were no remnants of greasy popcorn, no cotton candy, no animal shit or off-brand cigarette smoke. The smells were gone. The people were gone. But the sounds, those lingered somewhere in between the open sky and the snaking grass.

Sound has a way of living on and being noticed. When you are drawn forward, you say something is calling you. When you have a passion, you say it’s a calling. Something was calling to Rose now. Something under the grass, beaten into the ground loosened by so many new roots. Or maybe something up in the stars, hanging like the ancestral portraits in the night gallery just above her head.