Besides, there’s something else here now. A flash of gray in the corner of my eye, and dread spirals through me. I scan the crowd as more bodies pour across dirt paths and untrimmed fields, everything gone muddy with a thousand restless footprints. I tell myself maybe it wasn’t really there. Maybe I’m imagining ghosts where there are only smiling faces.

Then I smell it. That rank pelt. That hot breath. Another streak of gray, and those familiar red eyes are peering out through the shadows.

There’s a wolf in Golden Gate Park, and no one can see him but me. He’s good at hiding, slipping behind wild roses and tiger lilies, settling down in the coastal scrub, always out of sight. He doesn’t want anybody else to notice him. That’s because he’s mine. My omen, here to warn me about something.

Only, he’s already too late. A dulcet laugh echoes right through me, down into my aching veins, into a body that still doesn’t feel like my own.

“Hello again,” they say, their voices in unison. Three girls in plain cotton frocks, their faces hard as concrete. These are the same ones from Rochester’s bed last night. The girls that tried to stop Bee and me from leaving.

And maybe they’ll get their wish tonight, because with their eyes on me, they’re surrounding the car.

nine

The girls circle me, slowly at first, as calm and determined as vultures. Or sharks.

“Are you all alone?” they ask, their breath smelling of Marlboros and something sweet, something cloying like gumdrops.

“Apparently not,” I say, as they slither around the Buick, grins on their faces, their hearts beating faster. They draw a little closer to me, and for once, I’m grateful I don’t need to breathe, because they’d suffocate the air right out of me.

I sit back in the car, these strange girls swarming all around me. This is the first time I’ve really looked at their faces. At a distance, it’s easy to mistake them as the same, in their identical dresses, their long hair frizzed and lifeless at their backs. But there are tiny differences in them, differences enough to matter.

The one with a splash of red freckles on her cheeks.

The one who can’t make eye contact, who simply follows behind the others.

The one with an old scar on her jaw, an imprint of a fist perhaps, of a class ring once promised to her like a keepsake. Like a weapon.

They’re young, the same way that I guess Daisy’s young too, but I can’t figure out much beyond that, the girls lost at sea in that interminable gulf between nineteen and all the years thereafter. When you’ve been alive as long as I have, every age starts to feel the same.