“Don’t—” Ansel growled.
The worst part wasn’t even the animals, Saffy realized. Not their bared teeth, or their jellied eyes, or the way they’d been placed six measured inches apart, little dolls in a bed.
The worst part was Ansel’s face. He twisted into something Saffy had never seen before, a startling combination of surprise and anger. Ansel held the notebook close to his chest, protective, lips snarling. It looked nothing like him.
Saffy’s body decided for her: she ran. Before Ansel could say anything, she stumbled, panicked, back up the hill, the construction paper comic lost somewhere in the grass. A bug flew into her open mouth, a big black fly—she started to cry, panting as she tried to spit it onto the ground, waxy wings sticking stubborn to her tongue. There was a fact about life that Saffy hated, then: how it took the bad things and settled them inside you. It didn’t matter that you were a person, and it didn’t matter what you wanted. The bad lived insistently in your blood, a part of you always, calling out like a magnet to the horror of the world.
*
This was not Saffy Singh’s first experience with the morbid.
In the weeks after her mother died, Saffy imagined a frightening series of alternate deaths. She pictured her mother, decapitated on the side of the road. Her mother’s legs, poking out beneath the flaming torso of their Volvo, her mother impaled through the chest by the pole of a stop sign. Though she was only nine years old at the time of the accident, Saffy knew the police would lie to protect her. Head injury, they told her. Quick and painless. No, they said, when Saffy had asked, there had not been much blood. Saffy pictured her mother’s body, a crumpled heap in the middle of the road, like a discarded tissue.
*
Saffy slammed the back door to Miss Gemma’s with a shuddering crack, her legs trembling out of control.
Kristen and Lila were lounging on the bedroom floor with the bottle of Teenie Bikini nail polish. They jumped up when Saffy came in—usually, she’d be furious—but they quieted at the sight of her. Hair frizzed, static shock. They gathered Saffy onto the floor at the base of her bunk. What happened? they begged, crowding, as the acetone scent of the nail polish swam through Saffy’s head. Was it something bad? Where was Ansel? Saffy hated how they relished the thrill of the drama, her own this time. She could not fathom how to tell. She had solved the mystery after all.
When the knock came at the door, all three girls froze.
Kristen stood, tiptoed bravely forward.
“It’s Ansel,” she mouthed, peeking through the crack. At Saffy’s terrified expression, the violent shake of her head, Kristen shimmied halfway into the hall. Saffy and Lila waited, trying to decipher the vague whispers.
“What do you want?” Kristen demanded. The rest was muffled as she inched out of the room.
When Kristen came back in, she looked dazed. Stunned.
“What? What did he say?” Lila breathed.
In Kristen’s outstretched palm, she held two old and crumbling oatmeal raisin cookies. The kind Miss Gemma bought for birthdays, from a plastic carton on discount at the grocery store. They were tinged white with age—it seemed Ansel had been storing them to use in a moment like this. The sugary chunks stuck to the sweat on Kristen’s hand, a bizarre, mistaken gift.
An uneasy quiet.
“Um,” Kristen said, hushed now. “Whatever this means, Ansel said not to tell.”
Saffy turned to the trash can next to the bed, filled with used midnight Kleenex, and she gagged into the basin. Tentatively, Lila started to laugh. Kristen joined in, an anxious giggle. Still holding the trash can in her lap, Saffy was relieved by the stupid sound of Lila’s snorting, and she began to laugh too, those crumbling old cookies the weirdest thing any of them had ever seen.
*
That night, Saffy was on dinner duty. Tuna casserole. She plugged her nose when the smell of canned fish wafted from the sink.
“Are you okay, Saff?” Bailey asked. Bailey looked beautiful, her eyelashes clumped with mascara, hair hanging in a silky sheet. Kristen and Lila stood on chairs next to the stove, bickering over a pot of noodles, as Bailey pressed a cold hand to Saffy’s forehead. “You look kind of pale. You should go lie down. We can finish the casserole.”
Saffy could have cried with the kindness.
Back upstairs, she reveled in the alone of her bedroom. So delicious, and rare. Saffy climbed the ladder to her bunk, ready to topple in and forget. The smell did not stop her. It was unobtrusive at first, a faint rotting sweet. Halfway up the ladder, Saffy paused. Crinkled her nose. She pulled back her bedsheets.