Because she suspected she wouldn’t have much cause to wear a beaded singlet in Hollywood. She ran a thumb along a seam. Maybe she would become a costume designer, she thought, a stylist, one of those people who hide halfway down the movie credits. She saw them on Instagram. They seemed to make okay money.

God knew she’d need it.

Goodbye, creepy Flats, she thought. Goodbye, vacant lot where the church used to be. Goodbye, Bentley.

Four hours before kickoff and already South Street was deserted. The parking spaces were all empty. Signs hung in the windows of the Egg House, of Mr. Jack’s Steaks: CLOSED FOR GAME. She flinched when the deputy guarding the ruined bank waved at her from the mouth of the busted vault. She prayed he didn’t try to stop her.

She parked in front of the hardware store and looked through the front windows. Crazy. No lights from the back, no movement. Her father really was gone.

And yet even without him here, even with the deputy’s back to her, why did Kimbra feel like she was being watched?

She didn’t want an explanation. She hurried down the alleyway to the back door and punched the code into the beeping alarm, left the door ajar—she wouldn’t be here long. She flipped on the lights, scanned the top shelves of the old paint corner in the stockroom. She spotted Canary Yellow #65, just a little too far back on the shelf for her father to reach it easily. Right where she’d left it.

Kimbra retrieved the squeaky little stepladder and pulled down the can that contained close to twelve thousand dollars in cash.

She popped the lid loose and took a long smell of the fragrant money inside. God almighty, did she love it. After years of growing up just this side of bankrupt—her father may have been winning the battle against Walmart but Bentley had already lost the war with globalization or global warming or whatever had taken all the jobs away—Kimbra loved her money just like this: tucked together into little folds, growing like a green sea creature she fed with her time and her care and her savvy. Loved money not to spend, not to display, but to have.

The cash had been hard earned. It represented every dollar her father had paid her to work at the store, plus KT’s eight trips to Dallas over the summer, minus the money his mother had stolen in the spring, and minus also the outlay for fresh product. Asking Dylan to hold the cash for a time had been Kimbra’s idea after KT’s mom stole the first couple thousand. When Dylan bugged out because that Darren guy saw him with the cash, this paint can too had been Kimbra’s idea. The trips to the coast, the invented half brother, Floyd Tillery, even the fake address that KT’s guy in Dallas had given to Officer Clark on Monday: they had all been Kimbra’s ideas. Because she—they—had to get out of this place.