Itake my time getting home, which is a challenge, since the town part of Tempest is so small. A single strip of Highway 101, so short that you can watch it taper into the trees in either direction. There’s a huddle of storefronts, old-fashioned bells making a big deal every time a door opens.

I stop into the diner and study the menu. They’re not beholden to one category of food — they serve everything from chorizo omelets to sandwiches that are mostly sprouts to garlic-drenched pasta. I order the pasta to go. I’m begging forgiveness for the class I skipped, something I hope Mom will never hear about. Balancing a Styrofoam tower in one hand, I cross 101 and walk the last quarter mile.

An old-school neon sign, faded by daylight, marks Tempest Gardens. The cottages are quiet at midafternoon. Most people staying here are tourists, packing up cars filled with kids and coolers, coming back around dusk with hiking gear and bodily odors to match.

Mom’s car is, of course, missing. She hasn’t said much about her new job at a medical facility an hour away, which means she probably hates it. That fact settles on me like summer dust. Thick, hot, uncomfortable.

I fling open the screen door to cottage nine, put down the food, and peel off my shirt to take a shower.

Then I realize that Rush is there. For one stupid second, I think it’s for me. She wants to talk to me in that rough voice, or sing to me in the smooth one I heard in the woods.

I crash hard into the rocks of reality. She’s wearing an apron over jeans, and intense blue rubber gloves. Rush is cleaning the room where I semi-live.

I grab my top off the floor and put it back on over the black bralette I’ve been wearing under everything, the one that promises lacy fun. I cross my arms. Defending my boobs from — what? The fact that Rush isn’t looking at them? “How did you get here so fast?”

“Broom,” she says.

She doesn’t signal, in any way, that this is a joke.

“Oh.”

Rush points out the window at the parking lot, edged by cabins with lace curtains, trees crowding in like bodyguards.

“I have a car,” she says, and there it is, in its rust-nibbled glory. A piece of the bumper missing. A crack in the windshield spidering up from a corner. Duct tape on door handles. I can’t see the spells that she uses to hold it together, but I can’t imagine anything else would.

Rush crouches to clean one of the brass beds with some kind of solution. It smells like chemical death and stings my eyes even from a distance.

I don’t know what to say, but I know it’s my job to come up with something. Rush is the quiet one.

“Saving money for college?” I ask.