“Is she okay?” I said.

“She will be.” We bent to her, straightening her back, rearranging her arms. Lobo got a pillow from the couch for her head. I wiped the drool from her cheeks with my shirt. Lobo knew what to do. “I won’t let her do that again,” he said.

I looked up at him. “People don’t tend to try some things just once. You taught me that.”

“What do you know about it? Runt.” But then his face twitched again. He changed. “I won’t let her do that anymore. I promise you.”

That was the thing about Lobo. He was violent, cruel—and he kept his word. I could count on him like a burn: to wound, to fester, to flare up. Then to smooth over everything, like the hurt had never happened. To be a faint scar forever.

There was no plan, no discussion. Jamey put Starla to sleep, singing a country song I didn’t recognize, down on the same bed as Kaylee. The only bed, on the floor.

In a clearing by the farmhouse, meat sizzled on homemade spits: a hot dog skewer and a curtain rod. There was deer meat, and something greasy, maybe groundhog. I wondered if Grayson had prepared it. The men sat around the fire in stained canvas chairs or reclined on the dirt. The naked man had wrapped a sleeping bag around himself and put on shoes. The men were drinking—and it was only the men afforded this luxury. The women—because there were women at the campfire, Jamey and a few other girls who looked like Jamey—served, tending to the meat, replacing the men’s beers. I wanted to ask Jamey: where had the other women come from, why were they there? The men threw the empties into the woods.

Grayson and Dance sat among the men—but uneasily, on the edge of their circle. They were not drinking, either on purpose or because they had not been offered anything. Grayson had grease on his face; he had been working. He also had a fresh bruise on his forehead, and when he saw me looking at it, he tightened his mouth and shook his head.

Say nothing.

Their hands were not bound, I was relieved to see. Almost nothing would surprise me anymore, not zip ties or chains. Not a blizzard. Not a landslide of dust to sweep all of us, every living thing, away. Grayson fiddled with something. Keys.

I hoped they were the truck keys. He turned them over and over to keep his hands from trembling. Dance just sat there, cross-legged on the ground. He looked stunned and exhausted. What had they made him do?

“Stop staring.” Jamey thrust a bowl into my arms.

I looked down at the contents: shriveled brown potatoes. “I’m not staring.”

“Yeah, you are. Your boyfriend is fine.”

“They’re not my boyfriend. Either one of them.”

“If Jake thinks you like them, he’ll do something about it.”

I looked up from the bowl. “What does that mean?”