For instance, I found myself explaining how my father’s new house was small and clean. How it was so new it seemed somehow fake. It was the kind of house you could build in a factory and cart off to any suburb in America, my mother had said, but my father assured me this was not so, that it had been built where it stood, as if this were something I cared about. It was the exact opposite of the house I had grown up in, which was old and rambling, with a nonsensical floor plan and creaky stairs and one wooden panel that, if you pushed on it, slid upward to reveal a secret compartment in the wall. But there was nothing inside the compartment when I discovered it, and no matter what I hid away in there—food, money, a letter—no ghost girl or wall sprite came to collect it and leave me a bit of power or a mortal bargain in its place. It was just a hole in the wall, and I was the only one who ever looked into it.

Then I found myself telling him about the day I was standing with my bicycle on the corner, down the street from my house, and a boy came up and pushed me down, stole my bike, and pedaled away laughing. This was not long after my father had left. I ran home and told my mother, who called the police. I spent the rest of the afternoon in the back of a squad car. For a while, every time we passed a black boy, the cop would grip the wheel and ask, That him? though the boy hadn’t been black, and though I had described him carefully, twice. But soon the cop stopped asking, and his shoulders grew soft, and he began to talk, and to laugh loudly at things my mother said. She was wearing a floral sundress that day, one I liked, with buttons down the front. I could see her bare knees from the back seat. I had to stop liking the dress after that.

Later, in the car on the way to my father’s house, she said she was sorry about what had happened, sorry about my bike, glad I hadn’t been hurt. “Better to learn earlier rather than later that there are bad people in the world,” she said. “Maybe if your father understood that concept we wouldn’t have to live in this neighborhood.” We stopped, and her face was bathed in red light; she looked boiled. When we arrived, she didn’t get out of the car. “Pay attention to her tonight,” she told my father through the window. “If you can manage it.”