“Hey, don’t bite my head off, okay?”

“Sorry.” Nadia breathed out, then said it more like she really meant it. “I’m sorry. I’m just scared for Mateo. For all of us.”

Fear curled up inside Verlaine’s belly, cold and slithery. She remembered the map she’d posted on the Lightning Rod website, where anyone could see it (but, of course, no one ever looked). Again she thought about the target and envisioned herself standing in the center of it, looking up at an arrow swooshing down at her out of the sky.

But there was no running from what was coming. It was aimed not just at Verlaine, but at her uncles. Her house. Her closet. Smuckers. Everything she held dear and everything she hated—everything she knew.

What else was there to do but try to fight?

It seemed obvious to Verlaine, but as she watched Nadia curling up in her car, pulling on her headphones to try to shut out the world, she wasn’t sure Nadia remembered that right now.

Mateo didn’t blow off his shifts at the restaurant. The last thing he needed to deal with was Dad freaking out at him.

But other than that—he was free. At least until the school called his father, Mateo was free to do whatever he wanted.

And what he wanted to do was find out exactly how badly Elizabeth Pike, his supposed best friend, had screwed him over.

He started at home. It was easy enough to head back to the house after Dad had left to start getting ready to open La Catrina for lunch. Harder to go into the storage space beneath the house where Mom’s few remaining possessions were boxed away in a corner, behind Mateo’s old bike and a few sombreros left over from the restaurant redecoration seven years ago.

Mateo stood staring at the boxes, a crooked tower of cardboard. They were dusty. Nobody had ever opened them, not since the day his father had crammed them down here. As fondly as Dad remembered Mom, he never went through her old things; that wasn’t his way. Mateo had thought it wasn’t his, either. But now he began opening the boxes, one by one.

For the most part, they didn’t tell him much. He’d been hoping for a diary, something like that. Instead he found Mom’s clothes—neatly folded once, but now crumpled almost past recognition. And yet he remembered that green dress—she would wear it to Christmas parties. The pink sweater … Mateo had no one specific memory of it, but he knew he’d hugged her while she wore it.

Hesitantly he lifted the sweater to his face and inhaled. But it didn’t smell like Mom any longer, not even her perfume. It just smelled musty, like the back room at the Goodwill.

There were a few other things: some junky pieces of exercise equipment—she’d always had a bad habit of ordering them off television commercials, then never using them. A box filled with her costume jewelry. A folder filled with drawings he’d made for her when he was little; Mateo had to laugh at the crayoned image of him, Mom, and Cookie Monster all hanging out at the beach.