But that didn’t get her out of her punishment. She was grounded for two days for stealing the logbook from the security desk. Otto had created a diversion by throwing an epic temper tantrum in the middle of the lobby, and while the guard tried to soothe him, she swiped it. But some busybody had seen her do it, and here she was, sitting in this pink room with the pink comforter and the pink curtains and the pink, orange, and yellow pillows that her mother said looked like a sunrise but Cricket thought looked like pillows. Since Otto was two years younger than she, and more IMPRESSIONABLE, her parents said, he was grounded only for the afternoon.

It wasn’t fair.

So many things in the world weren’t.

The door creaked open. Her mother stood in the doorway sipping her coffee. “What kind of deeds, Cricket?”

Cricket swiped furiously at the tears that kept leaking from her eyes. Maybe she needed to go to the doctor, too, with all this leaking. “What?”

“You said this building is full of nefarious actors performing nefarious deeds. What kinds of deeds are you talking about?”

Cricket shrugged. She loved her mother, too, but Cricket had found that most people seemed to lose their minds somewhere around the age of eighteen or so. Suddenly, they don’t believe in anything. Not ghosts, not intruders, not spies, not NEFARIOUS ACTORS performing NEFARIOUS DEEDS. Mention that you heard the monster scratching under your bed again, and some adult will tell you that there’s no such thing, when you know perfectly well that there is, and they would, too, if only they paid attention. Mention spies, and a whole roomful of grown-ups will chuckle into their wine glasses—Cricket did not understand the point of wine, why would you want to drink something that made you silly?—and tell your mother how adorable you are and what an imagination you have and that maybe one day, you could be a storyteller or some person who makes cartoons or games for a living. Cricket didn’t even like cartoons and thought most games were a waste of time. She listened to true-crime podcasts and watched the news. She knew the ways of the world. She knew how things worked.

“Cricket?”

Cricket struggled to come up with vaguely nefarious deeds her mother would find believable so that she would stop asking all these questions. “There are a lot of people wearing loud shirts and those shorts that come down to your knees.”

“Bermuda shorts?”

“Is that what they wear in Bermuda?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why do they call them Bermuda shorts?”

“Cricket.”

“What?”

“I hardly think that people wearing silly clothes is nefarious. And I don’t think you think it’s nefarious, either. Why did you want that logbook?”