I took a deep breath. “Angelica,” I said. “I’m sorry about last summer. It was terrible, what I did.”

She smiled. “The stuttering thing? Don’t worry about it.” She waved at me and sucked her straw.

“Yes, that.” When I thought about the bits and coin dinner, my legs felt a little seasick. “But I was actually saying sorry about—the loft.”

She just looked at me.

“When you fell. I…pushed you.”

Her eyebrows went up. “You did? I thought I lost my balance.”

“No—your knee squashed my foot, and I kind of—” I kicked the empty chair in front of us, to demonstrate.

“Jeez, it was a two-minute thing. Did I ever show you this?” She pulled her hair back above her ear and showed me a pink mark on her scalp. “That’s where James threw a piece of wood at me when he was ten. It had a nail sticking out of it! Blood everywhere.”

“Yuck,” I said.

“Yeah. Those are nice sandals,” Angelica said.

“Thanks. Sonia and I got the same ones.”

She nodded. “Cool.”

It seemed like Angelica didn’t even notice my apology. I didn’t know what to do.

“Actually, I knew that you kicked me off,” Angelica said.

“You did?”

“Yeah, I know the difference between falling and being pushed, Bea. Duh.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You said.”

“I was afraid that when you fell, something happened. And that’s why your face had that problem and you had to go to the hospital.”

“What, because of getting my wind knocked out?”

“Yeah,” I whispered.

“That wasn’t why. I know why it happened. Karma. I got bad karma.”

“You what?”

“Bad luck. I brought it on myself. I threw away a toad.”

She threw away a toad?

Angelica looked at her hands again, which were just lying in her lap. Her nails looked really nice. She and Aunt Ess had probably gone for manicures.

“I was vacuuming—I have to vacuum the whole house, every Saturday. And I heard this noise in the hose that means something kind of big got sucked up. And when I looked, I saw this little toad in the canister. Ours is clear, so you can see. I don’t know if it was dead or not, but I didn’t—I didn’t do anything. I left it there, to get dumped.”

“Oh.” Poor toad.

She shrugged like she didn’t care, but her face looked like she was about to cry. “I don’t know why I didn’t let it out. I was mad about having to vacuum. There was a thing I wanted to go to with my friends, but my mom said I had to vacuum first. Anyway, the next day I woke up and my face was different. And then it got worse.”