Saturday mornings hadn’t felt that way since last year. Sneaking into the living room alone didn’t feel the same, and neither did eating junk food for breakfast. Instead, I stayed in bed and tried to force myself back to sleep. But now I found myself with that Saturday-morning feeling at the thought of heading back over to Jasper’s house. So I pulled on a sundress and a pair of sandals, gave my teeth a quick scrub, and quietly made my way down the hall, past my parents’ door, which was still closed, though the clock on the wall told me it was after nine. I left a note on the kitchen table:

Going to the coffee shop for a muffin. Back later.

The day was already crackling hot when I stepped through the kitchen door and into the driveway, but the sun felt good on my shoulders, coming out of the chilly air-conditioning inside. I was out in the street and walking fast when I had a thought and stopped. I turned back home, but instead of the house, I went to the garage.

We’d never really used our garage to store our cars like other people did. The garage was small for two cars, and Mom and Dad had never been able to agree on whose car got to go in it. They’d decided long ago it was better if neither one did. “Better two cars with equal amounts of bird poop than one clean car and a divorce,” Dad had said.

So the garage was mostly a spider habitat and a place to store all the junk that didn’t really have a spot inside the house. Now I pushed the door open and stumbled into a decade of outgrown tricycles and broken mops and boxes of hand-me-down rain boots that had never been handed down. There was slightly broken furniture that Mom intended to drag to the curb, but apparently not until it had a half inch of dust on it. It was almost like she couldn’t let things go until they’d gotten so filthy she would never let them inside the house again.

I sneezed twice as I moved partway through the mess, and then I reached up and flicked on the light. Across the room I spotted what it was what I’d come for: a blue plastic cooler, hung on the wall by its handle, beside a tangled pile of bright orange extension cords.