“We already talked about this. You’re not telling them, remember? Jesus. Don’t let Melissa hear you say that. She’ll feed you to your rat.”

Hazel hates the idea of her parents thinking she’s in bed when she’s somewhere across town at the mercy of kids she’s never met.

“I think I’ll ask them.” She touches the corner of her lip, which is starting to freeze over.

When Hazel gets home she checks the calendar of national and state parks in the kitchen. They’re up to Glacier National Park in Montana, which looks tropical compared to Lexington. A rainbow bridges two folded fabric peaks. A billy goat in the foreground laughs, gape-mouthed with Easter bunny ears.

New Year’s Eve is two days away, on Thursday. She feels like just yesterday her family was exchanging trinkets on Christmas Eve in Syracuse amid a herd of cousins too young to have any interest in Hazel. But now they’re back already, having left on Christmas to beat traffic. Now it’s 1999 in two days. And then just one more year until the whole millennium’s over.

Hazel enters the living room. Across the Oriental rug, her parents are in their matching toile armchairs like they always are when they’re not at work. Her father is reading a mystery, and her mother is reading the mystery her father read last week. Her father is always one book ahead. He’s always saying stuff like, “Did you get to the tuning fork in the gullet yet?”

Sometimes Hazel wonders when her father read that first book. Maybe someone read it to him before her mom was born, because he’s six months older. Maybe they haven’t always read mysteries. Maybe, before Hazel was born, they read westerns. Maybe, when she goes to college, they’ll read science fiction. Hazel’s dad will zoom ahead by light-years instead of pages. He’ll maul mutants on Uranus while Hazel’s mother stays on Earth, looking at the sky. If he gives away the end, she won’t even understand the language.

On the way to her parents and their mysteries stands a gauntlet of collections in curio cabinets and lightfast boxes. Hazel’s father is a big collector. He collects marbles and bookends and custard cups. He collects hatpins too, but he says Hazel’s mom collects them. “Show them your pins,” he says when visitors come. Hazel’s mom offers the cushion stuck through with baby silver arrows, but Hazel’s dad does the talking. He shows which pins were handmade before the switch to mass production in 1832, which models were outlawed due to dangerous length. Sometimes he aims an illegal one at a guest’s eye, laughing like a crazy person. That’s supposed to be a joke. Hazel used to be embarrassed by the collections, didn’t invite friends over because of them, but Melissa and Kit trot past the living room without a glance.

“Mom and Dad,” Hazel says, pressing her toes into the border of the rug. “I have a question.”

“Take off your snow pants,” her dad says. “You’re inside.”