She ran, her boots sinking into the spongy grass of the lawn—three strides, four, five, six—and she shoved down the crazy laugh that tried to bubble up into the floaty space that not-screaming had stretched into her throat. No was fading. Carly was coming back online. For her to laugh about this was just nuts, and that would make her cry. She kind of thought she should be crying.

Where her head had been full of nothing but No! now the swerve and dance of random thoughts, the weaving hum of thinking, came back to her. She was aware of being aware.

A stop-and-start afternoon rain raised a warm haze off the street. She breathed up the smell of oil, metallic dirt, and the ghost of spent tires. Her elbows hurt. She wanted things. To be far away. A milkshake. Her mother. To not have left school yet.

Ada flared brightly into Carly’s mind. She wanted to talk to her best friend, to tell her what had happened. They were usually together after school, but Ada had to get new glasses today. That’s why Carly had come straight home.

Ada played the ukulele. Carly drew. Carly had stacks of sketchbooks filled with cartoon characters and portraits of her friends and family. Ada wanted Carly to teach her to draw, so Carly had bargained for lessons on the ukulele. She’d never gotten past messing with the tuner the day before. Just yesterday? Really?

When Carly plucked a string, the tuner caught the vibrations out of the air. It measured what she’d done and delivered a little electronic verdict, a pixel needle wagging through the red toward the green zone, the sweet spot. Turn the peg, get closer to the green. Turn too far, and overshoot it back into red. It was like a game. More fun than the little guitar.

Carly did look back just once as she ran, when she was flying across her side yard into Mrs. Carmichael’s. He’d never catch her, even if he was back on his feet now.

But she ran faster anyway. Concrete to grass. Grass back to concrete. The pavement disappeared under her long, sprinting legs and it rose up into two short stairs and a stoop. She pounded on the green door of the neighbor’s house. The silk-flowered wreath jumped off its hook and rolled away.

That’s when things had gotten frustrating.

Trying to explain what had happened—to Mrs. Carmichael, and later to the police and to her mother—was like trying to tell a dream as a story right after you’d woken up. She kept stammering through backtracks to fill in the details of what came before to make it all make sense.