Which is great, except . . . Pipsie didn’t really adapt. Her wing healed crooked, so she could only fly about six inches off the ground in semicircular patterns. She fell off the perch all the time, so Uncle Bick just kept her in a box on the counter. One day, Pipsie got it in her tiny bird mind that she could fly again. She got up to the edge of the box and surveyed the landscape and spread her crooked wings and went for it. She fell off the counter and landed on the floor, just as the delivery guy swung the door open and rolled in three hundred pounds of birdseed on a hand truck.

This is all I could think about after Stephen told me to “adapt.”

Stephen drove Boo and me back to school, dropping us off a few streets away so that no one would see us coming back to school grounds in a police car. It was only five o’clock. People were filing into the refectory for dinner. I was too nauseous to eat. Boo was starving, though, so we walked over to the local coffee place, where she could get a sandwich. I watched her devour a ham and brie.

“So,” I said, “it’s your job to hang around with me?”

“Pretty much,” she said.

“How does this work?”

“Well, Stephen’s an actual police officer with a uniform and everything. Callum works undercover on the Underground, because there’s loads of ghosts down there. And I’m new. My first assignment was to come and watch over you.”

“So you had something happen to you?” I asked. “That’s why you’re like this?”

“When I was eighteen, I was a bit of a club kid—”

“When you were eighteen? How old are you now?”

“Twenty.”

“Twenty?”