Ursula waved her off. “Don’t be. I don’t regret a thing. It’s the price I paid for being able to hear the most beautiful sound in the universe … Do you guys want to see the sign for star?” She pointed both her index fingers toward the sky and swiped them against each other like she was trying to start a fire. “That’s Nic’s favorite. She says it looks like I’m trying to start a new dance craze and failing miserably.”

Finn laughed as she blinked away a tear. “It does kinda look like that.”

“Enough of the sad talk,” Ursula said, shuffling the sheet music on her desk into a pile. “It’s Friday.”

“What happens on Friday?”

The bonfire roared. Huge tongues of flame thrashed against the night sky, spitting embers into the stars. Ursula wandered off to talk to a gathering of her neighbors while Zadie and Finn settled themselves onto one of the serape-style blankets that encircled the fire. They were quiet for a while, observing the other residents as they danced and laughed and tossed bottles into the fire to see if they would melt. They seemed happy, the kind of happy that comes with feeling truly at home in a place. Zadie envied them. She had yet to find somewhere like that for herself.

“This place is so weird,” Finn said wistfully. Zadie looked over at her sister, a blue aura of moonlight outlining the coils of her hair. From anyone else, this would have been an insult, but not her. She had an affinity for all things strange. After all, it was an exclusive club of which she considered herself a member. People like Finn didn’t live in the suburbs. They lived in places like this, on the fringes of society surrounded by Technicolor cacti.

Finn began absentmindedly picking at the tassels on the end of the blanket. “I feel like I failed her.”

“You didn’t fail anyone. You got us this far.” Zadie should have been relieved. The trail had ostensibly gone cold, and maybe now she could salvage what was left of their trip by driving to the closest beach, or if there was none nearby, the closest swimming pool. But if she was being honest with herself, there was a small part of her that had hoped her mother’s signature had been in one of those ledgers. Maybe it would have absolved her of some of the guilt she’d been feeling for the last five years.

It was a premonition that had guided Zadie to the window just in time to see her mom leave, a premonition that could have prevented every gut-wrenching second that followed. But the words themselves were vague and forgettable, so forgettable that, to this day, Zadie couldn’t recall what they were. It hardly mattered. She had given up that life. What was the point of knowing a future she had no power to change?