“Okay. It’s just most grown-ups can’t do this kind of thing all the time. And your out-of-state plates . . .” Carly shifted the art case in her arms and put a toe up toward the bumper of Marcelline’s car. “I just don’t know what you do. You know, for a job or anything. I didn’t know if you can keep doing this with us, if this is something that can just keep going.”

The back of Marcelline’s neck went cold in the breeze. “I’ll be around. I’m enjoying the nonstop art party.”

“Me, too. Us, too. It’s been weird lately, you know, with the . . . Did you watch the video?”

A spike of alarm straightened Marcelline’s spine. She didn’t think Carly could have seen her at the table.

“I mean, it’s okay. Everybody has. And the first time you saw me, Dylan was making such a big deal about it, so I figured you had seen it at some point.”

“Yes, I saw it.”

Carly looked over at Ada, who had the dog on its back, leg pedaling from a belly scratch. “You know what the weird thing about movies and books is? You get all into it and it seems real, even though everything that happens is crazy different than regular life—but then it just ends. They never explain how anybody just does their usual stuff again after the aliens leave or the monster gets killed, or . . .” Carly stared past Marcelline’s shoulder. “Or the bad guy gets stopped. They never show how it goes back to normal.”

“I guess that’s not the part everyone finds interesting.”

“Unless you’re one of those people in real life. I’d think it was interesting.” Carly looked at Marcelline’s scar with open curiosity.

“You’ll get back to normal,” Marcelline said.

“Did you?”

The question crackled in the air. Carly couldn’t possibly know what she was asking, but Marcelline had the uncanny feeling that, on some level, somehow she did.

Carly didn’t yet understand how far from normal that video had taken her, or that it had brought the two of them together on this sidewalk outside the library. Her stepfather’s shadow covered both the video that had turned Carly’s life upside down and the scar that had spurred her to ask that incredibly intimate question.

Carly didn’t know that the turn back to everyone’s normal was still well ahead of them.

But what Marcelline knew about Carly’s circumstances and near future made sense. What Carly understood about Marcelline’s was pure dialed-in attention.