“He won’t starve if I feed him,” I said, balling my hands into fists and glaring. I was ready to fight, but Pop just gave me that dark look again, frustrated and sad, and walked away. That summer more than most, he didn’t have time to battle it out with a stubborn kid over the sad, brutal facts of life. He’d worked it out with Teddy Reardon to buy the house at the lake—it was on the verge of collapse then, a hundred years old and barely used for the last twenty-five—and would leave me to watch over the junkyard most afternoons while he worked to fix it up. I took the job seriously for about three days, which is how long it took me to realize that everyone in town knew what Pop was up to, and nobody was going to come around looking for scrap metal or car parts when he wasn’t here.
I didn’t mind. I was used to spending long hours alone, playing elaborate make-believe games based on things I’d read in books. I’d cast myself as a pirate, or a princess, and imagine that the heaps were high walls surrounding a strange and mysterious land that I was trying to either escape or plunder, depending on the day. I was good at pretending, and I preferred doing it alone; other kids would always mess up these games, breaking character or breaking the rules, and shattering the fantasy along with it. By myself, I could occupy a single story for hours or even days, picking up where I left off as soon as Pop’s car had disappeared down the road.
The weather that morning was ominous. The day had dawned gray and grim, the sky already heavy with low-hanging clouds. Pop had glanced at them, grumbling; he was still patching the roof of the lake house, and unhappy at the prospect of the work being interrupted by what seemed like an inevitable storm. To me, though, the massing clouds were just part of that day’s story: a witch had taken up residence in the woods, I decided, and had cast a curse that was slowly spreading like a dark sickness over the sky. I would have to make my way to her lair, and battle her black magic with my own. I filled a glass jar with the makings of a counterspell: clover blossoms, a length of ribbon, one of my baby teeth from a box where I kept odds and ends. （The tooth fairy had stopped showing up at our trailer as my father’s drinking grew worse, though I wouldn’t make the connection for years yet; in the meantime the unclaimed teeth made themselves useful at times like this.） When Rags crept out of the heaps, I gathered him in my arms and added him to the game: all the other cats in the yard were the witch’s servants, I decided, but this one had changed his allegiance after she cursed him with twisty legs.
I didn’t hear them arrive; I don’t know how long they’d been there, watching me. I was moving slowly and carefully through the heaps, making my way back toward the magical spot where the three rusted trucks sat nose to nose: if ever there were a spot to perform magic, that would be it. Absorbed in the game, lugging Rags along while he contentedly napped against my shoulder, it took me by surprise to realize that I wasn’t alone. A group of three kids, two boys and a girl, stood staring from beside the long stack of cars, blocking the yellowed grass path into the forest. I knew all three, of course, from school and from town. Two of them, a girl and a boy with dirty blond hair, were Brianne and Billy Carter, twelve and thirteen years old, the children of our nearest neighbors on the other side of the woods that abutted the back of the yard. Once upon a time we’d played together, back when my mother was still alive to facilitate such things, but that friendliness had disappeared when she did; now they only ever showed up to throw rocks at the cars, and my father had spoken to them more than once about not crossing onto our property. Clearly, they hadn’t listened.
The other boy, DJ, was younger—he’d sat a row behind me in Miss Lightbody’s fifth-grade class the previous year—but he was big for his age, so that he and Billy stood almost shoulder to shoulder. From the smirks on their faces, I guessed they must have been watching me for a while.
“Oh my God, it’s disgusting,” Brianne said loudly, and her brother grinned.
“I told you,” Billy said. “She kisses it and everything.”
“Oh my God,” Brianne said again, and let out something between a giggle and a shriek.
It took me a beat to understand that they were talking about the cat, who was still obliviously snoozing in my arms with his funny forelegs tucked up under his chin. It took me longer to understand the full meaning of that “I told you,” to realize that this wasn’t the first time Billy Carter had crept onto our property and watched me while I played in the yard with Rags. He had been here before, maybe more than once, maybe hanging back in the woods so I wouldn’t see him—or maybe I’d just been so lost in my stupid games that I never noticed I wasn’t alone. Now he was back, and he’d brought an audience.