Finn’s first instinct turned out to be right. From that day on, she could feel memories everywhere she went. At school, on the playground, between the dim library stacks. Bathrooms in particular were a hot spot for bad memories. It’s where people came for privacy when they needed to cry. Finn couldn’t walk into a stall without feeling like Moaning Myrtle was in there with her. Zadie assumed she didn’t like bathrooms because of the decades’ worth of smells, which is why she sometimes called Finn’s gift “Smell-O-Vision.”

During the years that followed, Finn got used to the “echoes.” They weren’t usually complete memories, just sensory fragments: the sound of a doorbell, the drag of water running through hair, the sour scent of newly laid mulch. Most of the time, Finn had no idea whom the echoes belonged to. But sometimes, if she held the echo in her mind long enough, she could pull on the thread and glean a little more information about the original owner. It wasn’t something she did often, because she sometimes discovered things she would have preferred not knowing. It was for this reason that she linked her pinkie finger around her sister’s and repeated after her, “I promise to never use my ability on you.” To this day, she’d held true to that promise. They both had.

Finn … Kathy was calling her name, but her voice was mostly drowned out by the sound of firecrackers from last year’s Labor Day picnic.

Hey, Finn! Kathy was now looking directly at her. Finn hadn’t yet told her foster family about her echoes. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust them. She just couldn’t imagine a universe in which they took her at her word and didn’t ask a million probing questions and didn’t spend an hour on the phone with their psychologist friend, Greg, who didn’t set up an appointment for her with Greg’s colleague, Jill.

No. They couldn’t know. For now, at least, she would continue to let them believe she was just a spacey kid whose attention sometimes required a loud dog whistle.

Finn inhaled a deep pocket of air and let it out slowly. As she did, the firecracker pops faded away and were replaced with a sound equally as jarring. “Finn!” Kathy shouted. “What do you think? Folding chairs or hay?”

Finn thought for a moment. “Why don’t you just put blankets on top of the hay?”

Kathy made a clucking sound with her tongue and fired a finger pistol at her. “That’s why you’re the high school graduate!” Then she turned back to the planner and said earnestly, “We’re so proud of her.”