“Everyone just, like, buys into the facade of happiness that society is trying to sell them,” she can remember London saying last night, before dinner. “Like, really, death is the only thing that can ever save them from their boring, pointless life of drudgery.” The embarrassing thing is, at thirty-four, Finn can still relate to this. She watches the girls hanging out in the food court on a Monday morning in July texting their friends, drinking pop, flirting with boys, and waiting for something to happen, thinking their lives are going to be so much better when they are grown up because they are going to do it right, they are going to beat the odds and hold on to their ideals and not let themselves turn into boring, jaded adults. And she thinks, Yes! Yes, do that! For the love of god, please, somebody do that.

It’s with this hope in her heart that Finn goes over to the nearest table of long legs and pink hoodies and, in what she hopes is her least creepy-old-person voice, says, “Hey, do any of you guys know London Parker-Stewart?”

Four blond-ponytailed heads turn towards her. “Who?” asks the ponytail closest to her, in a voice so withering she can almost feel her inner child curling up and dying.

“London Parker-Stewart,” another girl says. “London Parker-Stewart. Doesn’t she go to Westgate?”

“Isn’t she some kind of eco-slut?” another girl asks.

“Doesn’t she have, like, seventeen brothers and sisters, all with different dads?”

“Didn’t her mother, like, die in a boat that went over the falls?”

Finn clenches her fists at her sides. “It was a barrel,” she says. “And it wasn’t her mother. And she didn’t die.” And what the fuck is an eco-slut?

Four blond ponytails whip away from her. “Um, touchy, much?” the first girl says. “By the way, nice Birkenstocks.”

It’s amazing how you can grow up and think you’re self-assured and confident and then one biting comment from a bitchy teenaged girl can cut you into pieces. She looks down at her sad feet in her sadder shoes. She can still smell the coffee she spilled on herself in Hamish’s truck on the way here, which is bigger than her father’s and unwieldy and a bitch and a half to park with a Tim’s cup in your hand. She doesn’t understand why they haven’t mentioned her swollen nose, or her three-days-unwashed hair, or that her shirt is on inside out, something she is just noticing now as she surveys her pathetic self. “So, what I’m getting from you is that you haven’t seen London,” she says, mostly to her feet.

“Check, like, the forest or something,” the first girl says. “She’s probably off hugging a tree.”

“Or fucking a shark,” another girl says.