“Yep. I had a hard time with other students in Baltimore. Mostly because I’m weird and kind of really broken.”

I clicked through. Kenzie fighting back.

“Didn’t happen. I wondered what would happen if I did that.”

Another scene. Kenzie at the office, in front of school administrators.

“That did happen. I got in so much trouble even when I didn’t do anything except try not to get shoved around. I didn’t hit back that often.”

Another scene.

Kenzie and the boy hugging, while a school administrator stood by with arms folded, looking grim.

“I saw that happen on TV, and I wondered. Best case scenario, if that happened? We hug, we make up, find common ground, and they protect me. I like that one. It’s simple, almost maybe kind of believable, isn’t it?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But someone who’d push around a girl a year or two younger than them can’t be very nice. I feel like you deserve better than that.”

She shrugged. “Thank you for saying so. It feels… like a relief, almost, to see these and go back to them now and then. Like I can make sense of everything if I can recreate it and look back on it.”

“Does it feel like things don’t make sense?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Put another one in?”

“It feels invasive,” I said.

“I’m okay with that,” she said. “All’s fair, when I do it to others. Quid pro pro.”

I picked out one card, turning it over. “I asked earlier about resources, and it looks like you ran out at some point.”

“Huh?”

“I might be reading this label wrong, but it looks like you have a lot of cards where there are gaps or breaks between the color dabs, so you have two sets of scenes on one card.”

“That’s not right,” she said. She approached, reaching for the card. She took it. “Yeah, no, you got it wrong. White’s a color, it’s just easy to miss against the white label background.”

“Ahh,” I said.

“You can figure it out if you know what the labels mean. Yellow, purple, red, red, white, baby blue, green. Purple is action, red is pain, right? I went over that. White is an ending, baby blue is me being younger. Green is happy. So in this scene, I probably get in a fight, I get hurt, and then I die. Then I’m reborn or reincarnated. There’s a lot of colors, so it gets confusing.”

I blinked a few times, taking that in, rereading the colors to verify the meaning.

She smiled, pushing the card into my hand. “Put it in. We’ll see if I’m right.”

I closed my hand around both the card and her hand. “Did Jessica know about that, too?”