“What?” Scarlett asked.

Spencer just shook his head and snapped the guard back into position.

“Nothing,” he said. “I should get going. Walk out with me?”

Outside, Spencer’s bike was looking a little worse than usual. It had been the duct-tape special since he was in high school, but now one of the handlebars was bent up and forward, like the horn of a bull.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Oh yeah,” he said, unlocking it. “A little present from yesterday. I went to pick up some new copies of my headshot, and when I came out, this is what it looked like. The whole frame is messed up. Someone must have nailed it with a car. I’m on a lucky streak these days.”

He fastened the bike chain around his waist and squatted down, balancing the bike in his hands and examining the line of vision from seat level. The bike was clearly crooked. He rolled it along as they walked down the sidewalk, and it was obviously a struggle. It kept pulling in Scarlett’s direction, sometimes nudging her, and he would drag it back.

“Can you really ride that?” she asked.

“I don’t have much choice. It’s mostly okay, except that it always wants to go left now, so I have to steer right to keep it straight.”

“That’s really bad in traffic. There’s about a dozen ways to die on that thing.”

Spencer stopped and looked at her like she was a genius.

“A dozen ways to die,” he repeated. “That’s it!”

“What?”

“I’m going to strangle this guy in a few different ways, besides the tie. I’ll make everything dangerous. Like when the oxygen mask drops down, I’ll strangle him on the cord. I can do the same thing with the inflatable life preserver. I’ll make him the most inept passenger of all time. You always think of something!” He yelled some kind of farewell as he wobbled off into traffic at high speed.

It was just dawn now, a violent burst of sun breaking between the buildings on the east side. Scarlett pulled her phone from the pocket of her pajama shorts. The screen displayed the time, signal strength, battery life…but otherwise, its face was blank and stupid.

She sat on the front step of the hotel and watched Mrs. Foo, their dry-cleaner neighbor, open the gate in front of her shop. She waved to Scarlett. Scarlett lifted her arm to wave back. The arm felt tired. The first wave of weariness washed over her; still…there was something about this up-with-the-dawn thing. What if…she wondered…what if she made today the first day of a whole new era? She was literally up with the dawn. School started in less than a week. The show was over. In a few hours, she’d be seeing all of her friends together for the first time since the end of school.

This was the day to begin again, to put Eric behind her, to think about what came next. Something quivered in her, something made of enthusiasm or exhaustion, something that told her that this was the plan. This was the way.