“Which house is his?” Moon, low, keeping one paintball gun for himself, handing the other up to Kincaid, who did some insane two-minute masterpiece on his face, a Day of the Dead−style skull, eyes bright in black hollows, teeth neon against his lips, and maybe he is the guerrilla artist after all, maybe he painted that date on the rocks just to fool us.

“Don’t know. I couldn’t ask anybody without being obvious. Obviously,” Trace says, then giggles. He pulls the princess mask down over his face. Too small for his head, the plastic oval seems to hover in the darkness, shiny and dimpling, a baby doll with a Mohawk and a disconcerting hole punched in the center of its pursed lips, and it’s all I can look at, that hole. “Hit everybody. That way, we’ll know we got Spicer.”

A queasy disintegrating feeling flutters through my stomach as Bree lifts a bag of bombs into her lap, and I close my eyes, fingers finding the slip of paper in my coat pocket. (Fortune favors the brave.) Behind my eyes waits Kincaid from Friday, sunshine and storefront shadows casting bars of darkness, then light, across his back as he left us outside of Song’s, slaloming down the sidewalk, away. Brave. I want to be that. Anything but ordinary, to see the whole alarm-school-homework-bed drudgery as optional, not life. Maybe this is my chance. Cement myself with these guys, make real friends, no exaggeration or wishful thinking. They’re trusting me enough to want me in on this. I absolutely, positively cannot choke.

Trace turns to look at us in the backseat. “Ready?”

We murmur yeah. Sage says, “Babe? You’re a freak show. You know that, right?”

“Sure. I know.” Gradual pressure on the accelerator, turning onto Perfect. Slow and easy, the old-man car’s license plate number hidden under smeared marsh mud provided by Kincaid.

Bree, Moon, and Kincaid power their windows down. The street stretches out in front of us, lit windows through lace curtains, gleaming bumpers in driveways. Kincaid and Moon raise their guns, barrels on windowsills, fingers squeezing triggers, forcing air through PVC pipe—

Bang! Bang! Bang! as paintballs connect with aluminum garage doors, the sides of minivans and SUVs, orange and black paint vomiting all over white clapboards and mailboxes.

Faster now—Bree heaves her bombs out the window, and I haul the second bag up from the floor, dumping more artillery into her lap, Bree swearing, fumbling. A smash of broken glass—one of the paintballs must’ve hit a window. Trace is laughing, yelling something.

Flash of a porch light turning on ahead, a woman stepping outside in a white bathrobe, clutching the collar closed, grabbing our attention for an instant—