I forgot to kiss her goodbye.

Rain pelts my yellow slicker as I hesitate halfway up the steps on the first day of third grade at my new school. Around me, other kids run hand in hand with their mothers or fathers, heading for the front door, trying to escape the downpour. Some of them wear yellow slickers and rubber rain boots just like mine. Some of them are sheltered by the umbrellas their parents hold above their heads.

There’s no one to shelter me, to hold my hand. I’m alone, and I forgot to kiss her goodbye.

Should I go forward? Back?

I stand frozen.

Mommy’s battered gray car with the rusted rear door and the dented bumper is still parked in front of the school. Through the misted window I see the pale smudge of her face. She’s watching me, waiting to see me safely inside.

I run down the stairs toward the car, hoping she’ll push the door open, step out, come to me. Foolish hope. I know by now that wishes don’t come true.

When I reach the car I press the tip of my finger to the window and draw the shape of a heart, raindrops clinging to my lashes and running down my cheeks. Then I press my lips to the wet glass and kiss her goodbye. She smiles with her mouth but not with her eyes. For her, even the car is too open a space. I smile back because I made her smile, if only a little.

Then I turn and run up the stairs as the morning bell chimes, loving her and hating her and telling myself it isn’t her fault.

* * *

The ancient pickup barrels along the narrow highway that clings to the edge of a cliff. On my right, the earth juts skyward, a wall of gray and brown and green. On my left, a single lane separates me from the white churn of the ocean that crashes against the rocks below.

Wind gusts off the water, making the pickup shiver and shake. The seatbelt isn’t working and there’s no grab handle so I curl my fingers into the worn seat and hold on. As if that will save me if we go over the edge. The driver—Rick, according to how he introduced himself when he picked me up at the airport in San Francisco; Richard Parsons, according to the letter my aunt sent—slaps his breast pocket, hauls out a cigarette one-handed, tucks it between his lips and pushes in the lighter to heat it up. He takes a deep lungful of smoke and blows it out, adding new cigarette stink to the old cigarette stink that mixes with the scents of sweat and mildew and sickly sweet rot coming off the fast food wrappers on the floor.

Rain pounds the windshield, the wipers smearing hazy arcs.

It’s the rain that makes me remember that day. I wonder if I made the wrong choice, if Mom would have stepped out of the car had I not run back to her, if she would have lived a different life if I’d only waited on those stairs, waited for her to come to me. But in my heart of hearts, I know I could have stood there for hours, even days, and she would have stayed trapped in her cocoon, tears streaming down her cheeks, eyes darting side to side, seeing things only she could see.

She must have driven home after she left me at school. She never drove again. I walked home alone that day using my memory of the landmarks she’d pointed out and the map she’d sketched on the torn corner of a piece of pink construction paper. She was waiting for me just inside the door to our building and she grabbed me and pulled me close as soon as I crossed the threshold. I walked alone to school and back the next day and every day after. The car sat untouched for six months and then Mom called someone and a tow truck came and hooked it up and that was the end of that. Mom said it was a good thing, a smart thing, because owning a car when you lived hand to mouth was just a mess of crazy.

Staring straight ahead at the yellow dividing line that unfurls like a ribbon, I swallow against the lump in my throat. It moves down a few inches to sit behind my breastbone, leaden.

Might-have-beens don’t matter, Luce. Don’t look back, baby. Never look back. Just forward, always forward. Mom wasn’t much one for nostalgia. No photo albums. No rogue’s gallery of baby pictures on the wall. We never ordered the class picture I suffered through each year. She never even showed me a picture of my dad, Joss Warner, though I figure I must look like him since Mom was blond, blue-eyed, and china doll pretty, and I’m brown-haired with hazel eyes.

Choices. Did I make the wrong one coming here?

Beside me, Rick hacks up a lung, then takes a final drag of his cigarette and stubs it out in the overflowing ashtray.

“You’re a real chatterbox, huh?” he says as he hunches forward against the wheel and peers through the windshield, his stained ball cap shadowing his craggy face. I don’t like him, don’t like the way he looked at me when he found me at the airport or the sneer in his voice when he said my aunt’s name. Pat, he’d said, like he was horking up a loogie. But he’s my ride north and I have no other way to get where I’m going. If I’d had another option, I’d have taken it. But I didn’t, and I don’t, and it’s a waste of effort to wish otherwise.

The truck skids as we round another curve, number one million and six of the curves we’ve rounded on this endless drive. I slap my hand against the window for balance and say, “We could slow down.”

Rick glances at me then back at the road. “No need.” He thumps a closed fist against the dash. “She’s been getting me where I need to be for almost twenty years.”

I grew up knowing not to walk down Mermaid Avenue at night, to never trust that the N, Q or R would be on time, to fade into the background when the situation called for it, and to speak up for myself when there wasn’t anyone else to speak up for me. So I speak up now, making my voice calm even though my heart trip-hammers as I say, “I’d like you to slow down. I’d like to get there alive.”

Rick’s mouth twists and he turns his head toward me, this man I don’t know, don’t need to know in order to read his expression: anger, and something else, something darker.

He points his right index finger at me, close to my face. “You—”

The wind gusts, catching us on a rare stretch of straight road. The pickup swerves to the right, almost slamming up against the wall of earth that spikes toward the sky. The truck goes one way and I go the other, digging in my fingers to keep myself from sliding all the way across the bench seat and slamming into Rick. He swears and jerks the wheel to the left, sending the truck in the opposite direction, across the yellow line, closer to the flimsy rail that’s all that holds us back from the jagged rocks and crashing surf.

The back end fishtails, the truck gliding over wet asphalt like skates on ice. With a snarl, he jerks the wheel to the right and we’re back in our lane, speeding along the deserted, rain-slick road.

My breath comes in short gasps.

The needle of the speedometer eases down a couple of notches.

I don’t say anything. He doesn’t say anything. We drive.

I shiver and I know he sees it. I don’t want him to think it’s from fear because people like him feed on that.

“There’s a draft,” I say, reaching up to poke at the faulty seal between the doorframe and the window that’s been leaking icy drops since the rain began. Water pools on my fingertip, slides down across my palm, along my wrist, my forearm, my elbow, before dripping off onto my denim-clad thigh.

This morning I’d dressed for what I thought was late June California weather: black t-shirt, denim cut-offs that stop mid-thigh, my purple plaid Converse, my wavy hair in a ponytail, the ever present curly-frizzy bits escaping at the sides. Then I’d locked the apartment door for the very last time. It was empty. I’d sold everything I could, and what didn’t find a buyer, I’d donated or dragged to the Dumpster. Everything I own is smooshed into the massive, camping-sized backpack I’d discovered in a second-hand store. It sits now between my feet, the top grazing my knees.

I stare out the window at the rain, not really seeing anything.

I’d left Brooklyn thirteen hours ago.

A bus ride and plane ride and truck ride ago.

A lifetime ago.

I shiver again, and this time it really is from the cold. It didn’t take long after we left San Francisco behind for me to figure out that I don’t know shit about Northern California weather. I unzip the pack, pull out my black hoodie, and shrug it on.

In the pocket is the letter my aunt sent, folded in half and in half again. I’d read it twice on the plane, adding to the dozen or so times I’d read it in the week since it arrived. Each subsequent read yielded no more information than the first.

A letter. Not an email. Not a phone call.

Aunt Patience wrote me a letter in response to the letter I sent her because the only contact info I had was a yellowed slip of paper with a hand-written mailing address. I found it in the drawer of Mom’s bedside table. I tried to get a phone number for my aunt so I could call, but either my search engine skills failed me, or my aunt doesn’t have a landline. I pretty much wrote: your sister is dead. She pretty much wrote back in her cramped, wobbly, back-slanted cursive: I didn’t know she was sick. Here is a plane ticket to San Francisco, though I no longer live there. I am in Carnage Bay now. Your uncle poses no objection to you coming. A man, Richard Parsons, will fetch you from the airport.

The abundance of warmth and welcome in that brief paragraph left me all soft and fuzzy inside. The first time I read her reply, I wondered why my aunt didn’t call me or email, why she wouldn’t meet me at the airport herself. I wondered briefly if Richard Parsons was my uncle, but my aunt’s wording—a man, Richard Parsons—made me think not. There was no time to write her back to ask the questions churning in my thoughts and then wait for her to mail her reply. Not if I wanted to make that flight. Any answers I’m going to get will have to wait until I see her in person.

I almost decided not to come. I could have taken the $738.00 I have to my name and gone anywhere.

I could have just disappeared with no one the wiser, no one to care.

But I made a promise, and I keep my promises, even when they make no sense.

“I need to know you’ll be safe,” Mom said when she told me to go find her sister. “You’ll be happy with Patience. You were always happy to see her. Remember?”

I haven’t seen Aunt Pat in eight years, maybe more. I have fuzzy memories of a young, pretty blond woman. Girl, actually. At the time, she must have been just a little older than I am now. I remember big blue eyes like Mom’s, but Aunt Pat’s turned up a little at the corners, especially when she laughed. She laughed a lot. Mom laughed with her, which was rare enough both before and after Aunt Pat’s visits that the image stands clear and bold in my thoughts.

I remember that my aunt visited every few weeks for a while, in the time before Mom stopped going outside altogether. The fading strains of the music at the carousel in Central Park dance at the edges of my memories, Aunt Pat riding the horse next to mine, Mom standing on the side, expression pinched and nervous, arms crossed and pressed tight to her midsection.

I remember that when Aunt Pat told me she was going away, that she wouldn’t see me but that she’d write to me, I cried into my pillow.

After she left, she kept her word, writing us long, colorful letters, happy stories of travel and excitement with a man she called My Prince. Houston, Las Vegas, Reno, San Francisco. Mom read those letters aloud to me like bedtime stories. After a couple of years they came less and less often, then not at all. I don’t know if Mom and Aunt Pat had a falling out or if distance drifted between them. It’s a long way from Brooklyn to California.

Of course, it wasn’t the distance that kept Mom from taking me for a visit…from taking me anywhere…ever.

Maybe my aunt will be able to explain the why of that. Just days before she died, Mom stared hard at me and said, “Pat has answers.”

“To what questions?” I asked.

“Questions and secrets and things best left buried.” Mom closed her eyes, the lids thin and papery. I drew the sheet higher. She grabbed my wrist with surprising strength and whispered, “Think carefully before you dig them up.” Her lids flipped open and she turned her head, her eyes locking on mine. “Promise you’ll go to her. Promise.”

She clutched at my hand, her fingers more bone than flesh, blue veins stark against gray-white skin. By then I’d stopped pretending that Mom was going to get better. Still, she refused to go to the hospital, refused to leave the apartment, sending the EMTs away when they came in response to my call.

She was more afraid of going outside than she was of dying.

“You used to call her Patty Cake. Do you remember?”

Her words made my chest tighten. Mom didn’t do nostalgia. I nodded even though I didn’t remember calling my aunt that and Mom nodded back, happy with my little white lie.

“You’ll be happy with her. With family. And she’ll tell you…”

She closed her eyes and I thought she’d fallen asleep. Then her lips—blue and chapped—moved and I leaned over to catch her words. “You didn’t promise to find her. I need you to promise, Lucian.”

So I promised.

Within weeks, orphaned, alone, my mother’s whispery demand haunting me, I used the one way ticket my aunt sent, got on a plane, and ended up here.

“Lucian,” Rick says, jarring me from my thoughts. “That’s a boy’s name, ain’t it? You’re not a boy dressed as a girl, are you?”

I realize that I haven’t paid attention to him or the rain or the road, lost in my own thoughts for who knows how many miles. The highway has veered inland, away from the ocean. We’re surrounded by trees now, and ahead of me where the road heads north…more trees, thick-trunked and tall.

Rick watches me, waiting for an answer. I almost ask him if I look like a boy, but I recall the feel of his eyes on me at the airport, raking me and stopping in places that creeped me out, so instead I say, “Lucian means light.”

I don’t tell him it was my brother’s name. Lucian Lafayette Warner. The brother I never met. The one who died three years before I was born without ever taking his first breath. And it was my sister’s name. The sister I never met. The one who died two years before I was born, her tiny body just shy of two pounds. At least, that’s the way Mom told it. She said I was lucky number three. The one who lived. She named me Lucian just like she named them Lucian. Because Mom was bat-shit crazy.

“I prefer Luce,” I say.

“Well, Lucian”—Rick bares his teeth—“I need gas and I need to take a shit. You might want to use the facilities yourself. Or you can wait till we get you to your aunt. We’re almost there now.”

He pulls off the road and circles around to the side of a squat brown building with a white sign on top that proclaims: Easy Mart. The rain’s let up, but concrete clouds edged in charcoal hang heavy in the sky, promising that there’s more to come.

* * *

Once the truck is parked, I push open the door, glad for the chance to stretch my legs. I pause, staring at my backpack, a wave of uncertainty crashing through me. Everything I own is in that pack. What if Rick drives away? What if he leaves me stranded? I don’t even have a phone number for my aunt. All I have—

All I have is her letter and on it, her address. I’ll find my way there and if Rick takes off with my backpack, my aunt can help me figure out a way to get it back. I repeat that to myself until my nerves settle.

Panic and fear swallowed my mother’s life whole. I won’t let them do the same to mine. I have goals, dreams, hopes, and I will see them come true. I’ll find a job and keep saving. I’ll go to college. I’ll build myself a life that makes me happy, brick by brick, stone by stone.

I slide my wallet out of the pack, shove it into my pocket, then slam the door shut and lift my head to find Rick standing by the truck, his sneer telling me that he’s guessed the direction of my thoughts. He drags the back of his hand across his nose then wipes it on his jeans. Turning my back on him, I walk around the corner of the building.

The door to the Easy Mart creaks as I push it open. There’s no one at the cash, but I can hear sounds of movement through the open door behind the counter and I figure the cashier is back there. The smell of coffee teases me. I walk over to the pot, thinking a precious dollar might be well spent on something to warm me from the inside out. I squash that thought like a bug. A dollar is a dollar. I need to save each one. The only person contributing to my college fund is me.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath through my nose, enjoying the aroma. Then I turn and walk back outside to stand beside the bench under the overhang and wait for Rick. The gas pumps are off to my left and he hasn’t pulled up to them yet. I figure he’s still taking care of the other task he mentioned with such delicate manners.

A couple of minutes later, the door of the Easy Mart creaks again as it opens. I glance over to see a man step out, his face weathered and lined, his body greyhound thin. In his hand is a paper cup with steam coming off the top. He holds it out toward me. “You look like you could use this.” When I make no move to accept his offering, he adds, “No charge.”

“I can pay.” The second the words are out I want to haul them back. If I’d wanted to waste a dollar on coffee, I would have.

One side of his mouth crooks up. “Didn’t mean to ruffle your feathers, girl. It’s just a cup of coffee. I put in a couple packets of sugar and some cream. You look like the sugar and cream type.”

Actually, I like my coffee hot and strong and black. One out of three is better than none, so I take the cup as is. “Thank you.”

“Take a load off.” He juts his chin toward the bench.

“I’ve been sitting most of the day. I’d rather stand.”

“I’ve been standing most of the day. I’d rather sit.” He settles himself at the opposite end of the bench, as far from me as he can get. I figure that’s for my comfort, not his. But you never can tell. People have all sorts of weird quirks. “You hitchhiking?” he asks, glancing first at the empty gas pumps then the empty parking lot.

I blow across the surface of the coffee, watching the steam curl up. “My ride’s parked around the side. He’s…occupied,” I say, for lack of a better description.

“You passing through or staying for a stretch?”

I cut him a sidelong glance.

He holds his hands up, palms forward. “Don’t need to tell me if you don’t want. It’s just that I know pretty much everyone around here. Only two other gas stations in Carnage Bay, and one more outside town limits to the north. At some point pretty much everyone shows up here for a fill. So if you’re visiting, I’d like to put your face to a name and link that name to one I already know.” He waggles his brows and says with unabashed glee, “I’m a busybody.”

Carnage Bay. Rick said we were almost there, but I hadn’t quite trusted him. “A busybody, huh?” I lift my coffee as if offering a toast. “I’d never have guessed.”

Easy Mart laughs. “So?” he prods. “Staying or going?”

I almost don’t answer because sharing information with strangers has never been a personal goal. Then I remember my aunt lives here. I live here now. Offending the locals on day one might not be my best plan. Besides, I’ll be needing a job and the Easy Mart might have an opening.

“I’m here to stay with my aunt,” I say.

“For how long?”

I shrug.

“Tell me your aunt’s name”—Easy Mart’s whole face creases into a smile—“and I’ll tell you some gossip.” He winks.

The corners of my mouth twitch. His good humor is kind of infectious and I can use something to smile about.

Just then, Rick’s truck eases into view. He parks in front of the pump and ambles over to open the gas cap.

Easy Mart’s eyes follow him, and he isn’t smiling any more. He pushes to his feet and when he looks at me again, his brows are drawn together, carving deep grooves above the bridge of his nose. “Is that your ride?”

I swallow, the coffee turning bitter and a little salty on my tongue. “Yes.”

“Your aunt’s name?” he asks, his expression neutral, his tone firm. He isn’t joking any more. And suddenly I want to tell him because I want to hear what he has to say about her. Rick hasn’t exactly been a chatty font of information on our drive north.

“Patience Warner.” Only as I say her name does it hit me: Mom’s married name was Warner. It’s my last name. So how can her little sister’s name be Warner? Yet that’s the name that was on the yellowed scrap of paper I found in the nightstand, the name I addressed the letter to. I didn’t notice the oddity at the time. Guess I was too busy burying my mother and selling everything we owned. Anyway, I doubt it’s a riddle Easy Mart can answer, but maybe he can answer some other questions. I try for a smile, but my face feels stiff. “I’ll take the gossip you promised now.”

Easy Mart shakes his head, and his eyes slide from mine. “I don’t want to make trouble.”

“Wait,” I say as he steps away. He stops, his back to me, his shoulders bunched and raised. “What sort of trouble?”

He looks back at me over his shoulder and from the tense set of his lips and the clench of his jaw, I can see he’s warring with speaking or staying silent. Silent wins. He reaches for the door handle.

“Wait,” I say again. “Please.”

“Your aunt’s name’s Patience Davey now, not Warner. You have a care around Mr. Davey.” I hear the growl of a motor and Easy Mart’s attention jerks to a point behind me, his expression darkening even more. But I don’t turn to see what has him frowning. I feel like this guy has something important to share and if I look away even for a second, he’ll decide not to tell me anything. After a long pause he grunts. “You take care around anyone with the Davey name.”

He pushes open the door. I think he’s had his say, but then he turns back toward me without crossing the threshold and the spring pulls the door shut with a snap. He stares at me, his lips drawn in a thin, pale line. Then he rubs the lower half of his face, his fingers sliding down off his jaw. “Why don’t you wait here, Patience Davey’s niece? Let Rick Parsons be on his way and you stay right here. There’s a boy comes by to take the evening shift at seven. I’ll take you home to my wife. Feed you some dinner. Then take you back the way you came. Send you back home.” He nods, and I can see he’s liking this plan more and more as he formulates it. “Yes, I’ll send you home. You’ll be happy I did.”

Can’t say I’m not tempted. Head back to Brooklyn, to the known and familiar. I have some good friends there. Abby. Nagar. Daph. I could find a shitty little room somewhere. Work a shitty little job. Figure out what it is I want to study and apply for school. A big part of me wishes I could grab hold of Easy Mart’s offer with both hands and just go home.

But home is gone, the apartment already rented to someone else, everything that made it home buried, sold or tossed.

Besides, I promised Mom I’d find Aunt Pat, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.

“My aunt’s the only home I have now,” I say, uncharacteristically open with this man whose name I don’t know, my tongue feeling thick and sluggish in my mouth. “She’s expecting me.”

Easy Mart’s shoulders move—up, down—as he takes a heavy breath. “Well…” He shoots a last look toward the gas pumps and Rick Parsons, and then yanks the door open once more. “That’s a shame. A damn shame.”

This time the door snaps shut only after he’s gone inside and I’m left alone under the overhang.

I slump down on the bench and sip at the coffee; it doesn’t taste so great between the cream and sugar and the sour edge of Easy Mart’s weird warnings. I curl my fingers around the cup, absorbing what little heat I can as I study the motorcycle parked in front of the second pump, the kind of bike that looks like it’s built for speed. A spray of mud from the wet road feathers the black paint. The rider climbs off, his face obscured by a black helmet. His black t-shirt is plastered against his back and chest, his jeans dark from the rain.

Rick says something to him as he puts the nozzle in the tank. I’m too far away to hear what it is, but the rider pulls off his helmet, sets it on the seat of his bike, and digs into his pocket, struggling a bit with the wet denim. He passes something to Rick, who hands back a folded bill. It’s an exchange I’ve seen a hundred times before, on street corners or in shadowed nooks.

The rider replaces the nozzle and saunters to the door, passing close enough that I can make out the details of the tattoo on his left forearm: a dark red stylized skull in a field of bright flowers. The ink runs all the way from his wrist, past his elbow, up his arm until it disappears under the short sleeve of his t-shirt. It’s beautiful.

“Take a picture.” The words aren’t exactly friendly, but there’s a smile in his voice that tempers them.

My gaze jerks up, but he’s through the door and all I see is shaggy dark hair, wide shoulders, and a hand reaching back to pull a wallet from a back pocket.

When he comes out a couple of minutes later, I catch a glimpse of his scowl before he turns away. Guess Easy Mart guy wasn’t too friendly to any friend of Rick’s.

He rides slowly past me, heading for the road. His visor’s down and I can’t see his eyes, but I can feel him watching me.

“New girl on display. Take a picture.” I’m pretty sure he doesn’t hear me over the sound of his engine, somewhere between a growl and a visceral rumble. Besides, there isn’t much heat to my words; he already stole my line.

I toss the still almost full coffee cup in the trash and head for Rick’s truck, our paths crossing as he heads inside to pay for his gas. He changes direction so he’s within inches of me as we pass. I shift at the waist to avoid brushing shoulders with him.

He stops and leers at me. “Makes the rounds, that boy does,” he says.

I shrug and keep walking.

When I get to the truck I find that Rick locked the doors, so I rest my forearms on the roof and watch until the lights on the back of the motorcycle disappear around a curve in the road.

oOo

The highway carries us back toward the ocean. Welcome to Carnage—I read the sign as we pass. It actually says, Welcome to Carnage Bay, but the first three words are painted dark blue and the word ‘bay’ is this thin script done in pale blue. Hard to see, unless you’re really looking.

“Who named this place?”

Rick squints at me. “Why?”

“Carnage Bay? Carnage means killing or murder or something. Who’d give a place like this”—I gesture out the window at the pretty little houses with their white picket fences. Seriously. White picket fences. Even under the heavy press of the bleak sky, this place is too pretty to be real—“a name like that?”

“Dunno. Maybe someone with a sense of humor.” Rick smirks around the cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. “Kind of like someone who’d give their girl a boy’s name.”

I shoot him a look that conveys my every justifiably denigrating thought, but he’s watching the road instead of me. “You don’t know the history of the name of your town?”

“Not my town,” he says. “I’ve only been living here for just under a year. Came here around the same time your uncle and aunt did.”

My aunt has been here a year? That doesn’t make sense. The paper I found in Mom’s drawer, the one with Aunt Pat’s address, was yellowed with age. “But—” I cut myself off. Whatever questions I have will hold until I see my aunt. I don’t exactly think of Rick as a reliable source of information.

“But what?” He watches me, eyes narrowed.

“Forget it.” I turn away from his too sharp gaze and stare out the window.

We pass a red building with a sign that proclaims: Town Hall. Then we pass a newer building with orange brick, green trim, gray roof, and glass block windows—the Carnage Bay Police Station.

“Carnage is big enough to warrant a police department of its own?” I feel sure the population was on the sign, but I didn’t notice it as we passed.

Rick grunts. “Got ourselves one Chief, and maybe a dozen officers.” He laughs, a phlegmy sound that makes me inch closer to the door. “You see a car with a light on top coming, you walk the other way, Lucian. Your uncle don’t care much for cops.”

Reassuring.

I turn my head and watch the town pass. A snort escapes me. I can’t help it. Between the trees, the picket fences, and the Town Hall, I feel like I’ve landed in a foreign country.

Up ahead is a low white building with a packed parking lot. The sign above it reads: Grocery. Produce. Liquor. Beer. Wine. Pizza. Deli. Hot food. An all-in-one stop shop.

There’s a black motorcycle parked out front.

A few minutes later Rick says, “Downtown Carnage. Blink and you’ll miss it.”

We pass a bank, a couple of clothing stores, a beautifully maintained old three story building with signs for a doctor, a dentist, an accountant, and a real estate agent out front. The movie theater boasts a marquee that has to be fifty years old, the kind where you place the letters by hand. There’s an ice cream store, a pizza place. A wine bar. Some more shops. The whole of downtown extends maybe three or four blocks. I plan to hit every business here until I find a job.

Eventually the road dips down a gentle hill, and the buildings frame a narrow V of ocean. Then we round a corner and we’re out of the main town, passing a couple of auto shops, a bowling alley, and some less than inviting squatty concrete buildings. And still we keep going. There are houses, but the distance between them grows wider and wider, the houses themselves set further and further back from the road.

Up ahead, where the coast juts into the ocean, a mansion sits at the edge of a cliff. We passed more than a few like it on the drive north, but this one feels different, isolated, cold, its lines stark and harsh. My skin tingles. My fingers and toes feel numb. I can’t drag my gaze away from the house.

ComeComeComeComeComeHomeComeHomeComeHome…

Lightning flashes, turning the house into a silhouette. A long, low rumble of thunder follows.

The road curves. The view changes.

The house is no longer visible from the road.

I press my thumb and index finger against my closed lids. I feel woozy, lightheaded, like there are weights strapped to my temples and my neck is too weak to hold them. I hadn’t realized I was this tired. It hit me like a kick to the head right after we left the Easy Mart.

When I open my eyes, it’s to see a sign announcing that we’re leaving Carnage Bay. I swivel to watch it disappear behind us as we keep going. My gut tightens, my nerves humming. “We just passed the sign that says we’re leaving Carnage Bay. I thought my aunt lives in Carnage Bay.”

Rick smiles at me, if pale lips drawn back to reveal tobacco-stained teeth can be called a smile. “Not exactly.”

“Then where exactly does she live?” I’d been in Rick’s truck for hours, since we left San Francisco. I’d felt uncomfortable with him since the second I met him, but now that discomfort swells like a sponge dropped in water.

It’s raining again, water drumming on the roof with a steady beat, a thin stream breaching the faulty seal and snaking down the glass. But despite the weather and my exhaustion, I’m getting the feeling I’d be better off taking my chances out in the downpour than in the truck with Rick.

“I want to know exactly where we’re going.” My fingers curl around the door handle.

He makes a sound somewhere between a grunt and a laugh. “Don’t get your panties in a wad, Lucian. It’s just along here.” He cuts a hard left onto what amounts to little more than a dirt path flanked by bushes and trees and unkempt grass as high as the tops of the tires.

My pulse kicks up and my palms go damp. We aren’t on a main road anymore. We aren’t anywhere near other cars or people.

I reach into the front pouch of my backpack and grab my key ring. Old keys. Useless keys, now. One is for the front door of the apartment building and one is for the back. One is for the storage locker. I don’t know why I even kept them or why I brought them with. But at this moment, I’m glad I did. Keeping my hand down below my right thigh so Rick can’t see, I form a fist with the longest key poking out beyond my curled baby finger. An improvised weapon.

Daph and I took a class in self-defense last year. They showed us how to go for the knee, the throat, the nose, the eyes, how to use a key ring or even a tightly rolled magazine as a weapon. Before that class, I thought the best way was to push all the keys between your fingers so they stuck out like spiky daggers. But the guy teaching the class said that would only work if you actually know how to throw a punch. I don’t. So if Rick comes for me, I’ll go for him with a hammer fist—the side of my fist and one protruding key—rather than my knuckles.

I focus on my breathing, trying to keep it slow and steady, trying not to telegraph my growing fear or my intent.

We round a bend and the trees break to an open lawn and a massive house standing against the backdrop of jagged whitecaps and raging ocean.

Rick slows to a stop. “This is exactly where your aunt lives,” he says, making fun of my earlier demands that he tell me where we were going. “Ain’t it pretty?”

Unease uncoils and stretches, coming alive in gradual degrees, climbing through me like a choking vine.

My gaze slides up the stone stairs, seeing them awash in stinging rain, feeling them hot beneath my bare feet under a blinding sun. Images and memories come at me, like I’ve been here before, lived here before.

Been afraid here before.