Queen picked pieces of straw from her sweater sleeves. “Well,” Queen said, “it could be that they’re like cats, they leave when they know they won’t last.” Queen tore a piece of straw into thinner and thinner pieces, like she could get it one molecule thick, like gold leaf. “I don’t know. Only one girl I knew left without asking permission.”

“What happened to her?” I said. My voice came out at a treble pitch.

Queen didn’t answer. “Let me ask you this—what did you tell your family when you left?” Queen said. We weren’t supposed to talk about our pasts, but I’d brought up my mother to begin with.

I said, “My mom and my ex think I’m in college. In Virginia.”

“College!” Queen laughed. My mother was likely awake in Durham now, probably eating Grape-Nuts, and probably imagining me drifting through a dining hall or bending my head over a book in a carrel. No, of course by now she’d know I wasn’t in college. She might have called, asking about a bill, and someone would have told her, No, a student by that name did not ever arrive for the fall semester. She might think I was dead or kidnapped. Maybe she’d sent out search parties, like the one for Gemini. Or maybe, in her resigned way, her resignation so deep it was almost sympathy, she knew I wanted to be left alone.

“What ex?” Queen said. I wondered if my mother had told Isaac. He too may have been looking for me. “Ex-boyfriend?” The word boyfriend was as ridiculous as the Container Store.

“He’s no one,” I said. “He wanted me to get educated and settle down.”

“He wanted to marry you?” she said.

“No,” I said. At the quarry, he had said he would marry me one day. But if he’d actually asked me, I didn’t know whether I could have left. “He used to talk all the time about wanting kids, though.”

“Kids,” Queen said. “That’s the only rule I have trouble with.” She looked around. The family would be waking up soon.

I was distressed at this admission. I wanted Queen to be more devoted to the rules than I was, so she could buoy me up. “We have to subtract from the world,” I said.

“Oh, sister,” she said. “I know.”

We sat in silence. I broke the honey grains in my teeth. The sun pulled pink mist from the ground. Finally, she said, “Tell me how you met him.”

I wasn’t supposed to wallow in the past, Bay had said, and on the first night Dice had told me to be mindful of crying over made-up stories. I let the silence stretch.

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” I said.