Aidy started running when she saw me. “What happened?” She looked every bit the part of a frantic parent as she dropped beside Emery to examine my knees. She took her inventory then leaned into my face, touching my apparently bruising skin with a firm tenderness, applying more pressure than she should, but not so much that I would cry out in pain.

“I’m okay,” I said, a parody of myself.

“What are we going to tell Mom and Dad?” she asked.

“The phone call,” we said together, both of us remembering the element of our punishment we’d let slip away. Aidy turned to Teeny. “What time is it?”

“Why?” Teeny observed the two of us, her very body a shield, leaning back and away, desperate not to catch whatever problems we had.

Bigs showed Aidy his phone screen. “We have to go,” Aidy announced upon seeing it. “We’ll be back soon.”

Her behavior was classic. We both knew our punishments to be somewhat decorative. We were, after all, standing next to Cadence Park when we were supposed to be inside our house. Yet she treated their rules for us as if we were legally bound to them.

“The Campbells have a car,” I reminded her as she tugged me along.

She had an internal debate with herself over what was easier, even though it was obvious the drive was the better choice. They could let us out at Arbor Street and we’d sneak back into our house the very way we came out.

“Hey, Bigs, could you drive us?” I decided for both of us. “And maybe, if you didn’t mind, wait a second while we get cleaned up and call our parents?”

“Can we all go home first? We’re still in our work uniforms,” Teeny said. “An eight-to-one shift and straight to search for you.”

“We’ll drop you off. You can call us when you’re ready to get picked up again,” Bigs told me.

Lucky for me, Aidy didn’t notice Harrison had not yet resurfaced. As we walked to the Civic, I nodded at Ruby like Go find him, which she understood. How convenient that she could read my body language then. Entire plans could be hatched through simple gestures and ignored through grand ones. We went in opposite directions, Ruby back down the bowl, us siblings into the car. Nick and Emery stayed stationary between us.

Bigs and Teeny dropped us off at Arbor Street. Aidy and I snuck back in the Marley way. As we shimmied and crawled, the pain of my fall started to settle. My head throbbed. My knees buzzed. Fighting against it as best I could, I took my shoes off before entering through our back door and tiptoed over to the house phone, containing my mess as much as possible.