After a minute Murphy sighed. “I guess this is our life now, huh?”

“Seems like it,” I said.

“We’re gonna get through this, okay?” she said. “Remember, I got your back no matter what.”

“And I got yours.”

That felt good. I needed to know that Murphy and I were in this together, same as always.

“Also,” she said, “dibs on first shower.”

“Go for it,” I said. “But I get the top bunk.”

“Ugh,” she said. “Fine. I don’t like top bunks anyway. I always feel like I’m going to fall out of them in the middle of the night.”

“Just do me a favor and don’t use all the hot water,” I said. “If there even is hot water out here.”

Murphy left, and I sat down on the bottom bunk and shut my eyes. What was up with that room? What was so strange about it?

I tried to clear my head like Mom used to make us do when we did group meditation. I know I told you Mom wasn’t religious, and she absolutely was not, at least not in the usual sense of the word. Mom believed that meditation allowed you to fall deeper into yourself, to tap into what she called “the lizard brain”—all the passed-down memories from our ancestors that piggyback onto our DNA. She believed that all people were basically geniuses somewhere in the back parts of their minds, in the subconscious, only we were cut off from it, like there was a wall between the front of your brain and the back. She thought that with enough practice you could figure out how to sneak information past it. It was like communing with your elders, she said, talking to the back part of your mind. You could learn all about yourself.

So that’s what I tried to do. I tried to communicate with whatever bits of Mom sat quiet in my DNA. I tried to feel everything that the room wanted me to feel.

In short, I wanted a vision. I wanted the room to speak.

I sat lotus-style for maybe fifteen minutes, just waiting, until my knees began to ache.

Nothing happened. The house creaked and moaned, Murphy sang off-key in the shower, and Grandma didn’t make a peep. The crickets chirped outside, and the tree frogs burped, and the insect world buzzed and scratched, and the moon rose high. But that room remained silent. Whatever secrets were there, they kept themselves tucked away quiet.

Soon Murphy came barging flat-footed down the hall. I swear, every time she comes in a room, it’s like an explosion, like she’s not so much entering a place as raiding it, like she’s a one-girl SWAT team.

I took a quick shower after her—there was almost no hot water left—and when I came back to the room, Murphy was wearing overalls. Like old-school denim ones with a sunflower patch sewed onto them.

“Get a load of these things,” she said.

“It’s a good look for you,” I said. “Like Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird.”