Bliss let go of Susan’s face. “Your father said it once to me,” she said. “We were high on psilocybin and wandered away from a Rainbow Gathering into a national forest and got lost.”

Susan didn’t point out the fact that most likely her father hadn’t meant those words to be some big metaphor—he was just trying to get them out of the woods. She didn’t want to quibble. Her mother wasn’t wrong. Susan didn’t exactly have a five-year plan. The Herald would certainly never take her back. Susan looked down at her pale, hairy knee poking through the hole she’d pulled apart in the black opaque fabric of her tights. It had started out the size of her pinkie, but she’d worried it and worried it and now it was big enough to put her arm though. How could she take care of herself? She couldn’t even take care of a pair of tights. She couldn’t even remember to shave her legs. “Don’t worry about the direction,” Susan repeated. “Just move. Got it.”

“And sweetie?” Bliss said, walking back around the counter.

“Yeah?” Susan said with a sigh.

Bliss’s smile vanished and she gave the caramel pot a determined stir. “Everyone loves my caramel apples,” she said. She picked up a Popsicle stick and stabbed another apple.

“I know,” Susan said.

Bliss gave her a satisfied nod.

“I’m going to lie down,” Susan said, turning for the stairs.

“Pigs can’t look up,” Bliss said.

“Excuse me?” Susan said.

“Pigs can’t look up,” Bliss said. “They can’t see the sky.” Bliss gave Susan a helpful smile. “We all have problems.”

“Thanks,” Susan said slowly. Bliss’s smile widened. Susan jabbed a thumb at the stairway. “I’m going to just move to my room now,” she said. Then she swiveled around and marched upstairs, the wooden stairs creaking under her feet. The smell of caramel followed her down the hall all the way to her bedroom. She thought of it that way now—her bedroom. When she’d first moved back in with her mother she had thought of it as her childhood room, or the guest room, or the room in which she was staying, or her mother’s meditation room. But it had been over a year since she’d moved back home, and more than seven months since she’d been fired from the Herald, and it wasn’t feeling so temporary anymore.

She didn’t even bother to kick off her shoes before she flopped down on her futon. Her hair-spray-coated hair crunched as it hit the pillow.

Halloween. Susan wasn’t sure she could take it. All those people acting like it was fun to splatter fake blood on their clothes and savage innocent pumpkins. If any kids came to their house dressed like Gretchen Lowell, Susan was going to pepper-spray them.