“I have to pee,” she said. “I’ll be outside.”

Outside it was bright and warm. Jays swooped through the clearing, and she heard the rat-tat of a woodpecker in the trees. She started to walk.

Her dad was gone now. A trick of a mind at the end of its rope. She wondered why he’d come. She had thought she was angry at Bullfrog and Ashley, but actually she was angry at him, or maybe just angry, anger that settled wherever she turned her gaze. Angry at herself, and at the trees. Angry at the sky that brought them there and the lake that caught them. Angry that she had ever left Salem and moved to the country, a move that started the chain of events that led to this moment. Anger that somehow her parents wanted a life like this and made it true.

That wasn’t fair. Was it?

She had been groomed for survival her whole life, and still she was failing. I give up, she thought. Take everything. Take my knife. Take my car. Take my money. Take me anywhere but here.

Take me to the suburbs.

Take me to school.

Take me wherever it is that normal people go. Teach me however it is that they live. Because they did, didn’t they? They just lived. They went to grocery stores and to the doctor. They went to movies and the gym. They went to work in the morning and home at night. They had pets, normal pets, and they sat on the couch and watched television and judged the people on-screen. Probably that was fun. She should try it. She should sit on a couch and eat popcorn and make pronouncements about people she didn’t know, as if she had the right, as if her opinion on them mattered. There was a reason that most people lived like that, and she should join them.

It all seemed very obvious and she was stupid to have missed it for so long. There was no reason to make life harder. There was no reason to make life hard at all. It was impossible enough already.

She had walked a long way and circled back, and come to the creek, and walked out on the peninsula of stones, kicking them as she walked. Sending each one skittering as far as she could.

That was when she smelled it. Strong, indistinguishable. Like fish and blood.

Like fish and blood. How strange. She remembered the smell, but not where it came from. It came from within her, she thought. And then she heard the voice, and she thought it was in her mind. Coming to her like music through water, garbled and distant. Her name in Ashley’s mouth. “Mara. Don’t move.”

Everyone was talking to her. Everyone she loved.

But it wasn’t Ashley. It was Bullfrog.

“Don’t move.”

It was a hiss, but it came like a punch. Brought Mara back to the world.

She saw him at the edge of the water, eight or ten yards downstream. Staring at her. He raised a finger and pointed. And when she turned her head, she knew what she would see.