Her elbow throbbed where she’d hit it when she fell, her leg hurt, and she had to pee so bad she’d wet her pants a little. Biting her lip, she fumbled with the zipper on her cords. Because they were so tight, she had a hard time pulling them down. She kept her eye on the woods across the road as she peed. By the time she’d finished and found a tissue, she could see a little better in the dark, and no man had come out of the trees, but her teeth were chattering.

She remembered the MapQuest directions. Callaway Road couldn’t be that much farther, and when she found it, all she had to do was walk 1.3 miles to get to the farm; 1.3 miles wasn’t far. Except she didn’t remember which direction they’d been going.

She swiped at her nose with the sleeve of her jacket. Somehow when Sal had pushed her out of the car, she’d rolled a little and gotten mixed up. She looked for a sign through the dark, but because the road was going uphill, all she could see was darkness. Maybe a car would come? But what if a kidnapper was driving it? Or a serial killer?

She thought they’d maybe been going uphill when Sal’s dad called. Even though she wasn’t sure, she picked up her backpack and started walking because she couldn’t stay here. The nighttime was a lot louder than she’d ever imagined. A spooky owl hooted, wind cracked in the trees, and things made slithery noises that she hoped wasn’t snakes because she was very afraid of snakes. No matter how hard she tried to hold them back, these little whimpery sounds kept coming out of her mouth.

She started thinking about her mom. Riley’d thrown up in her wastebasket when Ava had told her the news. At first, all she could think about was herself and what would happen to her. But then she’d thought about how her mom used to sing silly songs to her. That was when Riley had been a cute little kid, before she got fat and her mom stopped liking her. During the funeral, Riley kept imagining how scared her mom must have been when she felt her lungs filling up with water, and she’d started crying so hard that Ava’d had to take her out of the church. Afterward, her dad said she wasn’t allowed to go to the graveyard for the burial, and him and Aunt Gayle had a big fight about it, but her dad wasn’t afraid of Aunt Gayle like everybody else, so Ava took Riley home, and let her eat all the Pop-Tarts she wanted, and put her to bed.