“I know.” I swatted away a hovering horsefly, thinking of the epic meltdown Frankie had had the night before, first about having to sleep in the same space as three other people and then about the spider near her bed. Frankie has ADD and is on the autism spectrum, and sometimes things that seem fine to me are massively unfine to her. Then again, even when things were more normal, I worried about dying daily—and Frankie once walked toward a tornado—so I guess she’s stronger than me in a lot of ways.

“That internet quiz said I definitely have anxiety.”

“You needed an internet quiz to tell you that?” Colette said, nudging me with her shoulder. I shrugged. “I don’t get why you don’t just ask your mom to get you a therapist. I mean, she sends Frankie to one.”

“That’s why,” I said. “Therapists are expensive. She can’t afford to send both of us.”

“She said that?”

“No, but she would.”

I wasn’t really sure what she’d say. The truth was that I felt like, if I was really so bad off, my mom would’ve worried about me in the same way she’d worried about my sister. She would’ve forced me to go to a therapist already. Instead, she usually just told me to stop biting my nails or worrying so much if I ever brought anything up. She didn’t really understand what was going on in my head, and I didn’t really want to tell her, because my sister was . . . a lot.

“Anyway, keep going,” I said.

Before Frankie had gotten mad, Colette had been telling a ghost story about Crybaby Bridge, some bridge on the East Coast that was rumored to be where a monster threw crying babies who were annoying him over the railing.

Colette did an excited shoulder dance.

“Okay, so! Tons of people commented on the person’s post and said that if you go, you can sometimes, very faintly, hear the babies crying!”

“Ohmygod,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s so terrifying.”

“I know, but guess what!”

“What?”

“It’s actually goats!”

“Crying ghosts? That’s worse.”

“No, goats,” Colette said.

“The monster throws goats?” I asked.

“Ohmygod, Tess.” Colette threw her head back and laughed really hard. “No, the cries aren’t babies, they’re goats! I guess goats sound like crying babies. So, people were getting all freaked out, but it was just goats roaming around, eating grass under the bridge.”

“No way!” I said, laughing, too. “I love goats.”

“Me too,” she said. “Once, at a petting zoo, a goat ate a hole in my T-shirt.”

“I’ve seen them mow an entire field,” I said. “They need to mow this!” I waved my hand around in front of us, hitting another horsefly in the dark. They were lurking outside the perimeter of our repellent, waiting to chomp.