Standing in the waiting room again, I called a cab. I half-ran down the airport’s wide hall, and I heard my name being called, being called. I ignored it. Maybe that was the moment I became an Asher.

The driver guided his cab past La Vaquita, its plastic cow like a sentry on the roof; down Chapel Hill Road to Durham’s Greyhound bus stop, where I planned to spend the night. We were near Isaac’s squat, and not far from my mother’s house, but I did not want to see them, their disappointment, their resignation. All around me the scenery was falling away—houses slamming back against the ground, revealing they’d only been false fronts.

The cab driver looked at me sadly, but he could not halt my terrible progress. Night bugs flew from around my feet as I walked to the bus station’s ticket window. I had not been on the plane but I knew just how the flight to Virginia would have gone. I could see the pink sunset ocean tilting against the window, then flattening again, the sun splitting the plane’s quiet dark, the bleary bus ride into the center of town. No one would be waiting for me—Isaac had made me feel that anyone who knew me would eventually tire of me. My life had already flashed before my eyes.

I knew more about that uncertainty than this new uncertainty I’d thrown myself into. I told the clerk at the ticket counter that I wanted to go to the mountains, and I went to Asheville by the earliest bus, and there I met Bay.

* * *

The family had been gone eight days when, in the middle of the night, someone flicked on the electric light in the bedroom. No one had ever turned on the light after bedtime, the whole time I’d been there. Something was wrong. Everything constantly went wrong: the sheep escaped, or one of the dogs sounded the alarm about an invisible enemy. But no one ever turned on the bedroom light.

Disoriented, I closed my eyes and turned over and tried to burrow down again. I managed to sleep a little longer, until voices rose from the kitchen. Dice rushed through the bedrooms. “Maybell,” he called. “Josiah. Luxor.”

The people he named jolted from their bunks.

I saw Sunny sit up across from me, scratching his cheeks.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Let’s go see,” I said.

Bip’s voice came from a lower bunk. “If Dice didn’t call you, you shouldn’t.” I paused, but Sunny, either because he didn’t hear or because he didn’t care, was clambering down from his bunk. I jumped down too. Sunny reached his hand out, and I took it.