Kateri raises her eyebrows. “Kid in trouble,” she repeats. It’s clearly more than that.

And Bear cocks his head. “More trouble than he anticipated, apparently.”

“Well,” she says, “thanks for your time.”

“Thank you,” Bear says, and it’s a little too heavy-handed for her to just turn and walk out. A little too sarcastic, a little biting. He feels jilted, she thinks.

“What’s going to happen to the house?” Kateri asks.

“My house?” Bear says. “I’ll sell it,” he says.

“No, the house on Hidden Drive. The Jenkins house.”

Bear shrugs. “Cash sale?” he suggests.

“Keep me posted,” she says.

At home, she opens the sliding door that leads to her small wooden balcony and looks at the sky. There’s not a cloud in sight, and yet there are tiny crystal flurries around her face, catching under the light that comes from the window.

He didn’t look like anyone else in Spring Falls. Not even like the summer people who came through on their way deeper into the mountains.

And it unnerved her. He was exactly the kind of distraction she enjoyed. Smart but a little sarcastic, just at the edge of being mean. A little bit pretty. A little bit rough.

“Fuck,” she says aloud into the night air, and reaches inside for the last of her stashed cigarettes.

He wasn’t telling her everything.

Neither was Shannon.

SEVENTEEN: SHANNON

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17

I could see it only with two mirrors. A scar that seared from the underside of my arm, over one shoulder blade, up toward my neck, and into the middle of my spine. In the places where I could reach it, the skin felt different, like it couldn’t stretch, like part of me was made of plastic.

I let Bear touch it. And I shivered.

“Does it still hurt?” he asked.

“No,” I said, but it wasn’t quite true. Sometimes it shot with pain, the skin tight and hot. Sometimes it itched. “It’s sensitive,” I said.

“This is from the fire?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

His finger traced the outline, from my neck and around. “It kind of looks like Canada,” he said.

“I always kind of wished I had two,” I said, my face sideways on the pillow, watching him.

“Why?” he asked.

“So it would look like I had wings,” I said.

There were things I would never tell him. That I’d bought my bike with money I stole from my mother. I had always gotten my own checks and she had always kept them, saving them, she told me, for when I was older, and then I was old enough to care and there wasn’t any money. None. Of course they hadn’t been saved. She’d spent them as soon as she got them.

So I took a hundred dollars from her drawer, from the envelope where she set aside money for bills, for groceries. She never directly confronted me. We had a standoff in the hallway. The envelope of cash in her hand. Her body already showing her pregnancy with Birdie that we had also never talked about. She glared at me. I pushed past her to get outside. I wanted my own things. I wanted my own means.