But her gratitude was not made of what he thought it was. She was grateful for knowing what she was looking at. And for her new way of listening to people. Carly knew this was all bullshit. They could say what they wanted, but they couldn’t make her believe it.

•  •  •

The house felt strange. Again. John had taped a patchwork of cardboard over the broken window before they brought Carly home. They’d cleaned up every spot and shard of what had happened. The house smelled of ammonia and lemon polish, and the flat electrical whiff of the vacuum cleaner. But the air still held a fading haze of wrongness.

Carly wanted them to open all the windows and doors and let the wind sweep through the house. She wanted them to blast music, run the ceiling fans, the oven fan, the bathroom fans, the plug-in fan her mother used for white noise to sleep by. Carly wanted them to crank up the air conditioner and the heater all at the same time.

Change the air. Change the temperature. Pour sound into the corners like witching salt in scary movies. Let it all fly away through the window screens instead of settling over the floor like a ground fog she had to walk through.

But she didn’t say any of that. It would be too much for her mother, who only wanted Carly to be all right.

So she was all right.

She barely slept, though. All night she rode waves of thin dozing, sinking down into meandering thoughts that didn’t make any sense, then rising back up, overheated, to try to figure out what to do.

She knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to do it right now, but it was ages until daytime and any good excuse to leave the house.

She wanted to go to the place on the map where her mother had gone. She wanted to know what was out there.

But she had no way to make that happen. She’d never skipped school before. She imagined walking in the front door of the school and heading straight out the back again before the first bell rang. People did it. She knew they did. But it was all in the pronoun. They did. She didn’t.

In the morning, her head hurt and the light reflecting off the countertops was too bright, but she didn’t want to make a face that anyone would ask her about. How Carly was feeling was apparently the topic of the day. Her mother found a dozen different ways to ask her if she was okay. John found a dozen more.

So she ate all her breakfast and asked for more eggs and a refill of juice. Who did something like that who wasn’t feeling 100 percent? She was extra-portions-fine, as far as they knew.