I pull the skin of the leaf away from the bones of it. It looks like a skeleton. “Sounds familiar.” I don’t know how to say that I miss my mom, but Dee nods like she knows, she knows exactly, and her hair bounces slowly around her face like a lazy forest in a breeze. She has the hair I’ve been trying to grow out and into, a style I’ve been trying to own. It is black and curly, and she does nothing with it from what I can tell, but it works. Same with her body and the way she holds herself: strong, relaxed. She’s got swagger, a kind of stomp that just seems to come so easily.

“You hungry?” she asks.

“Sure, but—”

Dee looks behind us and quickly grabs me by the hand. Her touch feels like a current running up my arm as she pulls me between two houses. We lean against the brick wall of one of them, and then Dee walks toward the backyard. She peeks over the fence. Looks at me, eyebrows raised.

“What?” I whisper frantically. “What are you doing?”

She grins, oblivious to my concerns. “Come on. Let’s see if anyone here has something we can snack on.”

The sun darts behind the only cloud up there like it’s trying to hide, too. My mind races, but while I’m trying to decide what to do, Dee has opened the gate and is looking under a mat by the back door. She holds up a key like a talisman, her face split by a wonderful, terrible smile.

“Aha! People are so predictable.”

And in that moment, those exact words, things begin to slide forward for me. Forward and fast and off course from where I was going in the first place. I can almost see my other self, what I would be doing, sitting in Pete’s class, looking out the window at the cloudless sky, looking at a squirrel, remembering Lottie and Paige and how things used to be—like there are two of me in that moment, but one of me chose a new life.

People are so predictable.

I follow Dee inside.

The house is comfortable, cozy, decorated like a candy cottage with flowers and candles and little bowls of potpourri on the tables. I am afraid to touch anything, including the orange cat that has come over to me, winding itself around my legs as I stand frozen in fear. Can the police find fingerprints on a cat? Dee, meantime, is in the fridge, in the cupboards, humming to herself.

“Relax,” she says, over her shoulder. “People have way more than they need. No one is ever going to know we were here.” She pockets an apple and a couple of small bags of pretzels and cookies and other things from a cupboard that, yes, in truth, appears to be overflowing with snacks.

“Let’s look around.”