“We need to hurry. We have work in an hour,” Bigs reminded Teeny. They shoveled down their last bites. When they stood and hugged me goodbye in what felt like the same motion, my foggy brain could barely process what leaving meant.

“Thank you,” I mouthed as they walked out. The Campbell twins were the first to be removed from me after Marley’s death, carted off to a world outside of Cadence, where they built promises for bright futures. And still they returned.

Still they remembered.

Still they loved me back.

We didn’t require a long goodbye. Our history did it for us. Time and space could never touch what we kids of Albany had been to each other, and now that we knew our legacy was safe, memorialized in secrecy at Cadence Park, we didn’t need words to reaffirm it.

Only Aidy, Harrison, Nick, and I remained. “Where’s Ruby?” I asked.

“You didn’t hear her phone blowing up this morning? She was supposed to be babysitting her brothers. She ran out super early,” Harrison said.

Aidy’s eyes narrowed on Nick. “Do you have anywhere you need to be?”

One last remaining swig of my murk swished around the very base of me. Why did she keep us apart? There was no reason I could find, even still.

“No,” he told her.

“Would you mind helping Harrison do some of the things on the list? Olivia and I have somewhere we need to go.”

“We do?”

“It won’t take us very long. We’ll be back to help soon,” she assured Nick.

“Of course,” he said without hesitation.

The four of us finished eating the chocolate chip pancakes. It was so strange and so normal, like the continuation of a well-loved story that had been interrupted by unconscious hibernation. The normalness of strange—or the strangeness of normal—begged to be noticed. What a world this was, the Stanton girls with their boys, communing at noon for a meal in the family kitchen. Every pot, pan, and plate took on a different, brighter sheen. What a world, indeed.

I went to change. The piles on my floor had been rearranged into an unfamiliar landscape. Aidy had unearthed all my buried secrets. Even my own journal was open and lying atop my bed, with all my plans for the Adventure reading like Marley’s had, bold and nonsensical, lacking nuance.

I snapped the journal shut and sat beside it. My dresser drawers had been spilled out, long-neglected bottom contents flipped up to the top. I rummaged through everything and put on clothes I forgot I owned. Went to the bathroom and washed my face of yesterday’s disguise. The yellow in my bruises matched the golden flecks in my hazel eyes; flickers of Marley I’d never before noticed.

I was new.

I was ready.