For some reason, she finds herself remembering how, when she was a teenager, she and Kate used to sit in the kitchen at Victor Street and play Scrabble while Nicki was out with her friends. Kate would always try to play fake words and then make up all these ridiculous definitions for them. Finn can still remember some of them, as though she and Kate had invented a new language only they could speak. Buloc. Terriot. Jitch. Sluba.

“Sluba? What the heck is a sluba?”

“It’s an acronym. Like scuba but bigger.”

“Bigger?”

“Yeah. Instead of self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, it’s a super-large underwater breathing apparatus.”

“You’re a super-large underwater breathing apparatus.”

“Did you just call me a sluba? Because I didn’t tell you its other definition. In some countries, calling someone that can get your fingers chopped off.”

But just as quickly Finn hears Kate say, Things have been hard for Nicki.

Even after all those Saturday nights. Kate had been there; she couldn’t say she didn’t know about Finn’s loneliness. Her isolation. Finn had never fit in anywhere, except in that kitchen. And then suddenly, for reasons she could never understand, she didn’t fit in there either anymore.

“What happened, Mom?” she asks.

She’s not sure if she means with the waterfall or with the two of them. Most people would say the waterfall was the bigger mystery, but Finn knows which of the two questions will keep her up at night.

—

It’s after midnight when Finn pulls back into the driveway on Victor Street. She’s disappointed to see that the kitchen light is still on, even though the rest of the house is dark. She parks Nicki’s car on the lawn and leaves her keys in the ignition. Her feet make no sound as she walks across the lawn, her hands on the railing as she climbs up the front steps, giving the finger to the stars as she goes.

Nicki is sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of tea, reading another hairstyle magazine. “I wasn’t sure you were coming back,” she says. She doesn’t look up, just keeps flipping the pages, although Finn can tell she’s not really paying attention to any of the pictures.

“Sorry I took your car.”

Nicki reaches the end of the magazine and flips it over. She starts pulling at a dead cuticle. Nicki’s nails have always been the worst. “I wasn’t worried about the car,” she says.

“You were worried about me?”

She makes a little clicking noise with her tongue. “No,” she says. “Of course not.” She puts the end of the cuticle in her mouth and starts to pull. “What happened to your face?”

“I got punched.”

“Ha,” says Nicki. She spits a piece of dead skin out of her mouth.