A burst of wind sweeps up a tornado of leaves in front of me. In the dust crinkle particles of electric blue. Ecto-mist. The storm doesn’t calm and stands as a giant before me, like the universe has built an unbreakable barrier.

So I turn around. Take a right. And hustle past empty beer bottles, a rusty old tractor, and thorny bushes that pull at the bottoms of my jeans, under a hornet’s nest growing from a branch like an infected lymph.

The sight of Sawyer’s house turns my stomach. Puke green with a low roof weighed down by its moisture, seemingly built for one or two people.

I run for the house as quietly as possible, lift the cracked window, and climb through. My sneaker creaks against the floorboard. This room . . . is it a room? Or is it a dungeon of shoes, clothes, paintings, and pill bottles? Also . . . dirty dishes, cigarettes, and beer.

Gross . . . I can see why someone who grew up here would go crazy.

A fan whirs so fast on the ceiling it’s rattling back and forth. A display of flowers and sympathy cards sits on a bookshelf. In the middle there’s a picture of Sawyer smiling huge. On the shelves there are some paperbacks—A Grief Observed, Living in a Gray World.

But I want the closet . . . She said to search the closet . . .

I tiptoe closer to the cracked-open closet. Fiona’s rehearsed laughter comes muffled from the living room. Sawyer’s mom talking back. The floor creaks under my feet again.

“Fuck,” I whisper.

A text from Fiona: Running out of things to talk about. Let me know when you’ve looked.

In the closet, there’s a medium-sized box on the upper shelf and a mountain of clothes in between. There may be a hamper beneath them. If so, I can’t see it. No way to move all these clothes. So I step on the pile and start climbing.

I reach up and feel under the box. Heavy.

I text Fiona, please make some noise.

First, the volume of her voice goes up, and then I hear glass crashing.

“I’m so sorry!”

Because I guess we’re fucking up the whole house, I yank the box as hard as I can and tumble backward. I hit the floor on my back, with a pile of stuff avalanching on top of me, hitting me and the floor. I turn over, ignoring the pain in my forehead, and go through the items. Gift wrap? A wrench? A dead bouquet of flowers. Novels, and . . .

A breeze rushes through the open window, drawing in a blue dust, which whips back the cover of a journal, flips the pages, and closes it the opposite way.

“Thank you, ecto-mist,” I whisper as I swipe up the book.

Inside, it reads: Property of Sawyer. Do Not Read.

“Oh, I’m definitely gonna read this, you little bitch.”