“Camp was good,” Marlene went on. “I won the award for canoeing. Want to see?”

She opened up her bag, shuffled around through the dirty shorts and shirts and still-damp bathing suits and produced a small plastic trophy with a picture of a canoe on it. Marlene had never bothered to share something like this with Scarlett before. Scarlett had learned from television that the appropriate big sister reaction to this sort of thing was praise, but it seemed like too big a leap. Maybe she should start out slower, by fact-finding.

“How did you get this?” Scarlett asked. “What’s it for?”

“Canoeing.”

“Right, but, was it a race, or…”

Marlene squinted a bit, probably sensing Scarlett’s weakness and confusion, but she kept playing the politeness game. There was maybe a little tension in the jaw area, though. A sign of strain.

“It was just for canoeing,” she said.

“It’s great,” Scarlett said, turning it over once in her hands and passing it back quickly.

The trophy was stuffed back into the bag. Marlene idly twirled a lock of hair around her finger and looked around the Orchid Suite.

“When did your hair turn curly?” she asked.

“It…was always this way.”

“Even when you were a baby?”

“As long as I’ve had hair, it’s been like this.”

Unlike Scarlett and Lola, who were pure, total blonde, Marlene’s hair was slowly going a burnished red-blonde. It was long now, too, not quite curly and not quite straight. For a long time, it had been so fried by the cancer treatments that it was patchy and thin and fell out in big clumps, clogging the bathroom drains. Now that she had some hair, Marlene played with it constantly, obviously proud of it.

“I thought mine might grow in curly,” she said. “I like your hair. I wish mine was like it.”

You can’t complain about how big and unruly your hair gets to someone who’s happy to have hair at all. Scarlett guessed that Marlene knew this and had cornered her, conversationally. This was a politeness death match, and Marlene was winning.

“Have to go unpack,” she said, with an unnerving smile.

When Marlene got to the door, she turned and gave Scarlett a knowing look—the kind of look one spy might give another spy when she realizes that they are both spies and no one else is aware of the fact.

“Your outfit is pretty,” she said, and shut the door. “And it’s time to go. Lola’s waiting for us.”

Scarlett sat there in shock for a moment, stirring only when she heard her phone buzz. There was a text message from Dakota that read simply: I saw you do that. Don’t do it again. I AM WATCHING!