“Aliens!” yelled Simone, making me jump. “Are you out there?” She yelled across the lake, up to the sky. A dog barked.

“We come in peace!” yelled Leo. Simone and I cracked up. The proper professor, in his British accent, howling to the moon.

“Welcome to Earth!” I yelled as loud as I could.

“Shut up!” someone shouted from a window at Paul Bunyan’s. We laughed, harder than Mom and Jade with the pictures. Simone was doubled over as Leo responded loudly with a word I wasn’t allowed to say, and she hissed “Leo!” through her laughter.

“It feels good! It feels good to yell,” said Leo. “Mercy, sometimes you just want to . . . ,” and he let loose, a roar, a ripping thunder of sound across the lake. Even with voice raised he had an accent. Simone yelled, too, and before I knew it, I did the same. We were making so much noise, taking up space in this gigantic universe where we were just little dots, specks of dust floating around in a ginormous galaxy. And Leo discovered new planets and the galaxy grew and when it did, we shrank smaller and smaller. Just like Blair, shrinking into nothing, going from the shiniest star I knew to a thinner and thinner and thinner dash of light.

I yelled and I yelled, as loud as I could get. I yelled all the way to the moon. I yelled all the way to the stars. And when Simone and Leo stopped and looked at me, I kept yelling.

“Abby,” said Leo nervously, “maybe—”

“Stop,” said Simone harshly, holding up a hand. “You let her yell.” She turned back to me. “Go ahead, girl. You tell that sky what’s what.”

And so I did: I screamed, across the lake, across Wisconsin, all the way to Blair. Was this how she had felt on Memorial Day, yelling across Main Street, sending her voice to the sky? I yelled so loud I would scare Anna Rexia out of our house and out of our lives. Because after everything Blair had done, and after everything we’d been through, here I was: screaming for her to come back, and screaming for her to stay away.

12

SEPTEMBER, THREE YEARS AGO

Nine years old

Three years before I screamed across Fishtrap Lake, setting fire to my vocal cords and waking up the fireflies, Dr. Leo Lacamoire was an accomplished astronomer preparing for a TED Talk. He was something, that Dr. Lacamoire: traveling the world for speeches, writing books about stars, always searching for new planets. Something terrible would happen to him soon, but he did not know that yet. All he knew was his fame and his fortune and his fans, each of them clamoring for a piece of the greatest scientist in the US.