“I know. She’s just a nice middle-aged woman. And maybe she has some cool things to say about my parents.” I know that will get Beth off my back. Any mention of my parents gets anyone off my back.

I hear her breath as she blows a bubble, the snap of the gum sticking to her lip. “I’m just trying to be a good friend. Don’t fault me for it.” Her voice has lowered again. “I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: you’ve been spending way too much time alone. It’s not like you and I can tell it’s getting to you. It would get to me.” But my finger is already hovering over the End Call button, eager to get Beth off the line.

“I appreciate it. But for real, now I have work to do. I’ll text you.” She spends one more minute reminding me to come to her party next weekend and I promise I will, even though we both know I won’t, and I hang up first, still fingering that crumpled receipt, studying the perfectly shaped eights in the handwritten phone number, each the same height, the same size.

Outside, a dog barks. And I bark back, loud and sharp, laughing at myself, my apartment easing into darkness as the sun sets.

2

May 1996

The house is massive. Just staring at it, she already feels lost.

She knew the family was rich, their house tucked into what used to be farmland so the husband could focus on his writing. Behind the house is a lake. It snakes through to her part of town—she’d capture frogs there as a child, wading into the swampy parts of the water. Once she brought one home, plopped into an old tomato sauce jar, and upon seeing his little girl clutching the jar so gingerly, her dad plunged his fleshy fingers into the container and grabbed the frog by its bulbous neck. Its eyes bulged so big she was sure they’d roll out. But instead, in what he described as a science experiment, a homespun biology-class frog dissection, he cut its throat with a steak knife, made her watch the creature’s green-tinted blood spurting out, dribbling down the wall.

She didn’t bring home another animal after that.

She reaches the front porch of this mammoth house, with upholstered chairs, a swing. A tiny spider scurries its way up a rail, disappearing into a crevice in the freshly painted wood. She knocks on the front door.