“I have no idea,” I said. “She hasn’t been home. Well, she has, but not when I’m there. I don’t even remember the last time I saw her. Last year sometime.”

We didn’t feed the fire. Tyson put another hemlock branch with its needles on top of the little flame. It popped. I wondered about Paige, what she looked like now. The last time I had seen her she was gaining weight and had stopped laughing so much.

Tyson said he was going to head home.

“Sit down,” JP said. “We have some hunting to do tonight.”

“We’re not going to see it,” Tyson said.

“Yes, we will. David, let me get another cigarette.”

“Let’s split one, I’m running low.”

We passed the cigarette between us. Three-drag pass. Tyson, as always, took crack drag, pulling off the cigarette until the cherry fell to the ground, smoking part of the filter. The fire slowly died and we stood. Our eyes were used to the dark. Thick trees blocked out the full moon. We didn’t need to see—the woods knew us. We moved effortlessly over the path. We knew all the ups and downs of the ground, where all the roots stuck out and reached for our feet.

Concrete. The streetlight on the road was bright, its orange light making me squint, the bulb buzzing and mingling against the sound of crickets. Headlights turned the corner of the hill, coming for us.

“Get in the woods,” JP said.

We tucked ourselves in a small ditch and mud sucked our shoes.

“Council passed a curfew ordinance,” JP whispered. “No one under eighteen can be out after ten unless they’re walking home.”

The vehicle drove by us. It wasn’t the police—it was the van with the film crew.

We hurried up the hill. Behind my house the path was lit, the ground aglow from the moon perched in the sky and through the trees. We followed the lighted path to the giant boulder that forked the path.

“Keep your eyes open,” JP said. He held a stick.

“What are you going to do with that?” I said. “Beat it?”

“What if it comes after me?”

I became more and more nervous at the thought of chasing the pugwagee. I didn’t want it to follow me home, wake me up in the middle of the night with its bangs on the walls and its little voices whispering down the hallway. I didn’t want to hear Mom yell and tell it to go away, the way she did with the Goog’ooks that knocked on the cabinet doors when she’d forget to put a cloth over the dirty dishes. I didn’t want Mom to complain to Frick, who would then light aflame his blessing and fill the house with thick smoke. I didn’t want the need to expunge.

I bit my nail too close to the skin.