“Yeah, I think so,” Jesse told her, glancing at the cut.

Jesse shifted his feet and turned toward the direction from which they’d come. “You left me, Mira. I heard you scream and I came for you but you were gone. What happened?” Jesse asked, hesitantly.

“We shouldn’t have gone,” Mira answered.

“But you said you wanted to find it. You said—”

“No, you were the one. You brought it up first. Why? What made you think of it?” Jesse’s silence fueled her anger and she kept going, turning her questions to accusations. “You heard someone talking about going at school, didn’t you? You always want to do what those white kids are doing. You heard one of them broke in and you thought you could do it too. That’s the reason. It’s your fault we went, and I—I—”

Mira couldn’t finish. She kept picturing the image of the man in the window, and her heart pounded. His face obscured—scarred? She tried to focus, but when she remembered she saw the blood again. There had been so much of it. He’d been covered in it. His clothes, his face—his face. If she could sit down, take a moment, maybe she could finish, maybe tell him about what she saw, but she kept picturing his face and the same tension filled her chest and she was unable to speak.

“You what, Mira?” Jesse coaxed. Hearing him say her name, it sounded like a purr almost, and she calmed. Jesse said her name again, this time softer, and waited for her to finish.

“Nothing,” Mira said, feeling guilty for lying. She bit her lip to keep from saying more.

Jesse rubbed the back of his head and glanced again in the direction of the woods. “I did see something, I think. When I was inside the house, but I don’t know. Maybe I just wanted something to be there. Earlier you and Celine were trying to convince me otherwise. Come on, you must have seen something. Why else would you have run?”

“I told you I didn’t see anything,” Mira shot back. “Shadows from the trees maybe. You were right. Nothing was out there. You were right all along.”

“Why won’t you tell me the truth?”

Jesse remained a moment longer, stalling in the hope Mira would change her mind, but when Mira wouldn’t, he shrugged and said he was going to head back home.

The afternoon sky was stained the color of a bruise, its darkness like a harkening shadow that made them hush, waiting for the thunder. The air held the pungent smell of rain about to fall. Mira pointed to the clouds and said maybe it’d be better if he waited inside until it passed, but Jesse told her no.