And here I hadn’t talked to her in a week. So I couldn’t help it. When a text came in, and I heard that little ping!, I’d sort of wake up a little more than usual. Just for a second. It was funny how that worked, with phones. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, when I got a text, it made me sit up straight, made my heart race just a little. Someone is thinking of me, I’d think.

Even if my very next thought was But it doesn’t really matter.

Anyway, sitting around the house watching TV and waiting for texts I didn’t care about very much wore out, and finally I couldn’t take it anymore.

So on Thursday, I put on actual pants that weren’t leggings and walked through my front door. Into the blazing, burning Georgia sun I hadn’t seen in a week. So bright it made me squint.

The problem was that even in my actual pants, I really had no place to go and nobody to go there with. Everyone else was somewhere. It was June seventh. The people who went to interesting and exotic places were off being interesting and exotic. The people who went to camp were already at camp. I’d always been a camp person, and so I had no clue—what did people do in the summer, all summer, at home? With no camp counselors and schedules? Arts and crafts? Ropes courses? Free swim? Summer was a long time when no one was planning it for you.

I walked to the end of my street and then turned right onto Woodland, and that felt pretty okay, walking, after a week in the house. Stretching. Seeing stuff. There were flowers to stare at in people’s yards. In front of the yellow house on the corner, James the brat was screaming his face off, and his mom, Kate, was looking like she wanted to scream her face off, and that was sort of interesting for a minute. Anyway, it was loud.

I waved at them, and Kate waved back, so then I thought about stopping over to say hi, but James was still fussing, and I didn’t really know them very well anyway. They’d only been in the neighborhood for a few years. I kept going.

The feral cats that lived in the church parking lot were sleeping in a patch of sun by the dumpster, and I stopped to say hi to them. They wouldn’t let you touch them, but they didn’t mind visitors, and I liked to watch them roll in the dust and lick themselves. At the corner, someone had scrawled new graffiti on the back of the stop sign. “GO TO HELL,” it said, “OR GO TO MARIETTA.” Funny.