And he did. And Mary set the pumpkin that had been knocked over straight. And Maddy giggled as her mother bent over. And Josie slipped out the front door and slid onto her bike and rode. She rode past the park, past Devesh’s house, past the university, and out of town and onto the roads with few houses and large pieces of land. She would ride until her legs gave out and she had reached someplace entirely unfamiliar, and then she would lie down in a ditch and hope the ground would swallow her.

She had nearly done it, knew her intention, felt the impulse and the charge, the instinct to hurt him. Just like when she was young and her temper flared. Once when her mother refused to let her have chocolate milk for breakfast, she had clawed four bright pink lines down her mother’s forearm. “You’re an animal,” her mother said, and the way she spit the word, and the pinpricks of blood on her mother’s golden skin, made Josie know her mother was right—the wrong child had died. Josie was wild, and unpredictable, and bad. And now she could see that she hadn’t outgrown any of that, or perhaps it had just grown back.

It was starting to get cold, but there was no rain, and she rode until she reached a small tobacco farm. An old drying shed sat in the corner of the field, grayed wood barely held together by rusty nails. She stopped. Her legs cramped violently, and she realized she must have been riding for a very long time. She laid her bike down on the ground and made her way to the shed. The door was gone, and she stepped inside. Moss had grown on the floor and worked its way up the baseboards, and the smell of wet wood permeated the air. The roof was still there, but planks were missing, and the gray sky made the ceiling look like a gloomy patchwork quilt. It was surprisingly warm inside, and Josie took off her sweatshirt and sat in the center of the room. The shed was no more than twelve feet across, and with the soft moss underneath and the quilt of a ceiling above, Josie felt she was in the middle of a gigantic bed. She bundled her sweatshirt under her head and lay on the ground.