Her smooth voice cuts through the morning silence. “In Lake Crosby, it’s currently twenty-seven degrees Fahrenheit with a windchill of thirteen. Today you can look for lots of snow.”

I don’t have to look very far. The windows are white with it, swirling snowflakes pelting the glass like insects around a light. At the bottom of the hill, the crime tape is still strung in a wide arc around the dock like party streamers, a slick yellow ribbon dancing in the wind. I hope the police took whatever they needed from our backyard before it got buried.

At the view, my stomach growls, not from hunger but from habit. A lingering reflex from all those times the roads were too slick for the school buses to pass, and Chet and I would have no other choice but to stay home. Trailer-park kids don’t wish for snow days like normal kids do, and we don’t spend all spring counting down to the first day of summer. Not when the free school lunch is our biggest, most nutritious meal of the day.

Even now, even in a house full of food, the scars still sting—and I’m not the only one.

Krissy Hinkel from two trailers down is banned from the Piggly Wiggly for life, after the umpteenth time getting caught shoplifting candy bars. Johnny Winger from across the yard never goes anywhere without food, his pockets bulging like a squirrel’s cheeks. I have secret piles of junk food, Doritos and Twinkies and industrial-sized boxes of Little Debbies, stashed under every bed and at the back of every closet in this house. Chet now wants to spend all day every day working with food. We all have our coping mechanisms from a constantly rumbling belly, some of them healthier than others.

In the pantry, I climb on the stepladder, remove the lid from the slow cooker on the top shelf and pull out a fistful of Slim Jims. I stare at the bouquet of gas station sausages, and I can already taste them on my tongue, the salt and meat and preservatives, can feel the smoke tickling my sinuses, that delicate tension before my teeth puncture the skin. Empty calories, Paul would call them, but he’s wrong. When you grow up starving, there’s no such thing.

The doorbell rings, and I toss them back in the slow cooker and scramble down.

The front yard is empty, all but a mishmash of fresh footprints that stomped down the snow by the front door, then moved in long strides around the left side of the house. I lean my head out the door and follow their path, my gaze landing on the word written across the snow in a series of angry red slashes.

KILLER.

I gasp and slam the front door.

A prank. A horrible, awful, vile prank. Who would do such a thing?