Katie was the first to admit it wasn’t her best work, but it wasn’t until the morning it was due that Katie remembered she had to do it. She was supposed to hand something in by fifth period and only had her lunch break to pull something together, and that was the best she could do without doing a “cut and paste” off the Internet. The school was pretty hard-nosed about this whole plagiarism thing, so if the teachers suspected you’d failed to write an assignment in your own words they Googled what you’d done. If the exact same wording came back, well, you could kiss that B-minus goodbye.

The thing is, Katie might have remembered to do the assignment were not it for—and this, ladies and gentlemen, is the third reason why she was wide awake at three in the morning—Jeremy Buttram. They’d kind of gotten into it a few nights earlier at a party and he’d tried to put her hand on his crotch, which, she supposed, was not that big a deal, and it wouldn’t have been the first time she’d grabbed that particular part of a young man’s anatomy, but there was something about Jeremy that turned her off, and she was wondering if it was because everyone called him “Buttface.” He didn’t have a bad face—it was, she figured, about a six, with a good chance of becoming a seven once he got older and his acne cleared up—but she just wasn’t sure she wanted to hang out with a guy with that kind of nickname. And as she lay awake, she couldn’t help but wonder whether this revealed something bad about her. That she could be so shallow as to shun a guy because he had an easily mockable name. But come on. Would he go out with a girl whose last name was Titfield, or Beaversmith?

When she grew weary of tossing and turning, she threw back the covers and swung her feet down to the floor. She went to the window to see whether Chief Joe’s car was parked way up the street. Before the Arrival experiment, he’d park his own car—a green, well-rusted Jeep Cherokee—up at the corner. Parking his work car, with garrett island police plastered all over the side, well, that was definitely going to attract a shitload of attention. And now that the department had been given a fleet of Arrivals with similar markings on the side, he couldn’t show up in that, either, so he’d been driving the one Arrival had given him in exchange for his personal set of wheels: a black one you could barely see when he didn’t leave it parked under a streetlight.

She didn’t see it anywhere on the street. So, Mom was not getting it on tonight.