A minute later there was noise from inside the vehicle, and Jessica strained to listen: it sounded like voices. No, a voice, she realized after a few minutes. Charlie was talking, but there was no one answering her. Jessica concentrated, trying to isolate the sounds, but she could make out nothing: whatever Charlie was saying, it was unintelligible from the trunk. Jessica balanced herself carefully, trying to lay as flat as she could while bracing her arm in the air to hold the latch of the trunk. If she didn’t hold it tight enough, it would visibly bounce and Charlie would notice it. But if she pulled it too close, the trunk might shut, and she would be trapped.

After about ten minutes, the car stopped short; Jessica was thrown back against the wall, almost losing hold of the latch. Regaining her balance, she held very still, listening. The driver’s side door opened; then closed a moment later. Jessica heard the faint sound of Charlie walking away, crunching over gravel, then silence. Jessica sighed in relief, but did not move. She began to count: “One Mississippi … two Mississippi …” she breathed, barely a whisper. There was no sound but her own hushed voice as she counted all the way to sixty, then stopped and scooted closer to the trunk door. She gently eased her grip of the trunk handle, letting the hood rise slowly.

The car was parked in the center of a large parking lot, illuminated impossibly bright by streetlamps. The light was tinged with red, and Jessica turned to see a large neon sign directly overhead, flooding the lot with brilliant reds and pinks and blocking her view of anything beyond. The air buzzed loudly with the noise of what must have been a hundred fluorescent bulbs. Jessica squinted and raised a hand to shade her eyes: the enormous, smiling face of a little girl stared down at her, glowing neon against the night sky. She was made up to look like a clown: her face was painted white, and her cheeks were marked with round, pink circles, her nose a matching triangle. Her bright orange hair was tied up in two pigtails on either side of her head, and beside her were fat, red letters outlined in yellow. Jessica peered at the backward sign for a moment before the letters made sense: CIRCUS BABY’S PIZZA. The glare of the light began to hurt her eyes, and she looked away, then ran toward the dark building at the edge of the lot, blinking to get the afterimage of the neon sign out of her head. She stumbled through a row of hedges to press into a white brick wall, which seemed brand-new. She lowered her hand from her face, her eyes adjusted to the light, and she saw a long row of tall, vertical windows along the face of the wall.