I got mailed a sock that year, and I spent most of the following days sneaking into my friends’ bedrooms to rummage through their underwear drawers. I never found the matching one, but folded into a rolled pair of Bigs’s socks, I discovered a picture of some boy from the sleepaway camp he and Teeny went to at the start of every summer. There was a heart drawn around the boy’s face. A photo of Teeny with her arm around that same boy was prominently framed in Teeny’s room. She talked about him (and to him) almost every day after she got back, until the school year came, and their long-distance camp romance had to go where all summertime activities went: into hibernation. Bigs never said a word about him. When the next year’s sleepaway camp came around, neither did Teeny.

Ruby read her letter one more time, then folded it up and tucked it into the pocket of her ripped jeans.

“Aidy thinks because there are letters, it means Marley planned to die.” I tried my hardest to make each syllable sound ridiculous and implausible, but my throat was too dry. I sounded naive. Sputtering, I fought to find the courage to explain what Marley had told me about the Adventure having a different purpose.

“Purpose? She used that word?” Ruby asked.

“Yeah. But when she said it, I took it as meaning she’d have a different goal or something. I can’t really explain right now.” I paused. “I see how that sort of proves Aidy’s point. But it’s not possible.” Another wave of upset began to wash over me. Tears rolled down my cheeks as my breath came out in hiccups.

Ruby found herself stopped up. “Olivia, the message on the wall in the sewer. You didn’t love me like I asked of you. Still I love you back.”

I fixated on the dark outline of raised land to my right, imagining the sky as the ground and the ground as the sky. I wanted the world to flip me over and empty out my hurt like loose change falling from pockets. In trying to form a response to Ruby, I couldn’t inhale without choking. No single thought of mine made sense.

“Aidy might be right,” Ruby said. She pulled me in close. “Hey. Listen.” She whispered our oldest, most private saying: “No stops.”