ALONE AGAIN ON the bus ride home.

I look up, waiting for the message under the overpass—Fear Him. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to unsee it, unknow it. Trying not to care that Bree and Sage didn’t wait for me after school. Going to the skate park together once isn’t exactly a blood bond.

Still. Damn it.

Instead, the Terraces wait, slumbering beneath a low, cotton-batting sky, most everyone at work, little kids still at school. I start the hike to our unit—feels like I’m always walking uphill in this town, my quads in a permanent state of lactic acid buildup—when, at the crest ahead, the hoodies pop out between Units Eleven and Twelve on their bikes, swerving toward the center of the street.

I dart to the left, knowing there’s a chance they saw me. Press up against the vinyl siding of Unit Six, straining to hear. Approaching voices, an occasional too-loud laugh, a shout of “Asshole!,” trying to shock some neighbor lady. If they’d seen me, they’d be on me by now.

I peer around the edge of the building and watch Green Hood, wearing a pair of gold shutter shades, lead the pack down the hill, popping an occasional wheelie to the general amazement of no one.

When I’m sure they’re really gone, I cut through the strip of backyards until I reach our stoop, rattling the doorknob before I remember that Mom’s not home. I have my key, but what’s inside—mostly bare walls, boxes of my books still waiting to be unpacked and shelved, nothing good in the fridge because it’s almost shopping day—doesn’t really call to me.

But the woods. They call.

Why can’t I take the trails to the skate park on my own? It doesn’t seem like you need an engraved invitation, and I wasted enough afternoons over the past year in Astley doing homework with the TV on for company, wondering what everybody else is up to. If Bree and Sage want a break from the welcome wagon, maybe I’ll snag myself a bench and start Kincaid surveillance. I leave my bag inside, then walk back down the hill.

I pass the laundry building—a dryer’s whumping around off-balance inside, sneakers in a heavy-duty cycle—and hesitate at the entrance to the trail, remembering Dabney Kirk and her missing head. What it might be like to look down and see a skull, gone gray and porous from years in the elements, jaw unhinged, the molded pearls of some girl’s teeth poised around my foot as if to bite.

I step gingerly after that, following the trail until I lose all sense of how long we walked last night before the girls guided me down the first turn to the park. Five minutes? Ten?