I picked up the bandana and ran it through my fingers. The cotton was a little stiffer than it had looked. It felt intimate, to touch an object that someone had loved. That Julie Zale had believed in, something she thought gave her power or strength. I thought about what it would be like to be her, running in a track meet—her legs burning, lungs heaving the air in and out, people cheering as she surged past them. I wondered what it would be like to have this man for an uncle, what could make someone be so cruel as to run away from him. Maybe Julie Zale and I were alike. Maybe she knew there was something bad, something grasping and greedy about her. And maybe it made her both love and hate him, for his gentleness, for the boundless kindness that she knew she didn’t deserve. It was how I had felt about some of my teachers at school before I dropped out. Mrs. Witz, who had recommended that I skip ahead from Geometry to Precalc. Ms. Connolly, who offered to loan me workbooks for the PSAT because she knew that I couldn’t afford to buy my own.

I closed my eyes. Where did I think Julie was? I had witnessed what happens to girls who run away and wash up here, like debris dragged in by the tide. She probably didn’t look like the picture in the posters anymore: Her once-smooth skin would be rutted with acne scars. Her hair dull and stringy. The piercing in her nose red and inflamed. I pictured her on a street corner, holding out a plastic cup, begging for change. Julie crouched in an alley, her skinny body swallowed up in a stained sweatshirt. Julie with a strap around her arm, feeling for the right vein, then her head lolling back on her neck. When I opened my eyes, her uncle was leaning forward, waiting. Everything about him made me feel guilty, sad. His polo shirt wrinkled from so many hours in the car. His thin, gray hair rearranged by the wind. Out on the pier, the roller coaster cranked up on its tracks. In a moment we would hear it plunge down the first drop, the few riders’ screams.