I picked up a pencil and took a deep breath, like I was trying to suck up every word in the English language. And I started tapping the paper, making these tiny little dots. Tap-tap-tap-tap and I just kept tapping. And I tried. I thought about the sun, how bright it was outside, how hot the world was getting, how pretty soon the world would overheat and we’d all die. But that wasn’t what I wanted to say. I thought about my half sister, Frances, and how I could take all my baby teeth, which I’d kept in a plastic baggie, and drive to my dad’s house and give them to her, like a gift. I thought about Zeke’s weird, crooked little mouth. I thought about the book I was writing, the girl criminal mastermind. Her name was Evie Fastabend. She was always calling her hideout, this little abandoned shack in the woods, the edge. It was her code name for when she wanted to do crimes. I need to go to the edge, she’d announce, and then she’d ride her bike to the woods, to this rickety shed, where she had a gun wrapped up in an old T-shirt. The edge, I thought. The edge. The edge. The edge. The edge.

And then I wrote. The edge is a shantytown—and I took another deep breath, realized I hadn’t been breathing that whole time. My vision got all fuzzy. Zeke touched my shoulder. “Are you okay?” he asked, but I was already writing more—filled with gold seekers.

Zeke looked over my shoulder at the paper. “That’s . . . okay, that’s kind of cool,” he said. “I like that.”

The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, I wrote. There was this little voice in my head, and it was telling me what to write down. And I knew that this little voice, this tiny, insistent voice, was not God and it wasn’t some muse and it wasn’t anyone in the world except for me. This voice was my voice. This voice was my voice and no one else’s voice, and I could hear it so clearly. And it wasn’t finished.

The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

And then the voice was gone. It went way, way back inside me. And I didn’t know if it would ever come back. And I finally read what was on the paper. “We are fugitives,” I said to Zeke, smiling. I was starting to laugh, a little hiccup of a laugh. “We are fugitives?” I asked him.

“And the law is skinny with hunger for us,” he said, smiling. It didn’t make a bit of sense. It meant nothing. But Zeke understood. That was all that mattered to me.