“Where are we going?” I asked him, the first of three times.

“You’ll see,” he said and we walked right out the front door of that Omaha home.

“You’re telling me you hadn’t been out of that house in what—six years?” Ms. Flores asks, doubtfully. She sinks a tea bag into a steaming mug of water, moving it up and down, up and down like a yo-yo because she hasn’t got the patience to wait for the tea to steep.

Momma used to love tea. Green tea. I catch the scent of Ms. Flores’s tea and in an instant, it reminds me of Momma, of the way she swore her green tea fought cancer and heart disease and old age.

Too bad it didn’t do anything to stop Bluebirds from tumbling down the road.

“Yes, ma’am,” I reply, trying hard to ignore the way Ms. Flores’s gray eyes call me a liar. “It was the first time I’d been anywhere, at least,” I say, “other than the backyard,” and even that was rare.

“Didn’t you think it was a bad idea?” asks Ms. Flores.

My minds drifts back to the day that Matthew and I left the Omaha home. I tell Ms. Flores that the air was cold. It was fall. The clouds in the sky were thick and heavy.

I can picture it still, that first day Matthew took me outside.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did you tell Matthew that? Did you tell him it was a bad idea?”

“No, ma’am.”

She yanks that tea bag from the cup and sets it on a paper napkin. “Well, why not, Claire? If you knew it was a bad idea, then why didn’t you say that to Matthew?” she asks, and I feel my shoulders rise up and shrug.

I remember that I walked close to Matthew, terrified to be outside. Terrified of the way the trees shook in the wind. Terrified of the cars that zoomed past, cars which I’d only ever seen from my bedroom window. I hadn’t been in a car since that day six years ago when Joseph and Miriam drove me to their home. For me, cars were bad. Cars were how Momma and Daddy died. Cars were how I ended up there, at Joseph and Miriam’s home.

I remember that Matthew tugged on my sleeve and we crossed the street. I peered back to see the house from outside, a house that was pretty almost, almost quaint. It wasn’t the newest house on the block, but it was charming nonetheless, with its crisp white paint, and the black shutters, and the gray stone that wrapped around the home. The front door was red.

I’d never seen the home from that angle before, from outside, from the front yard.

And then, for some reason, I got scared.

And I started running.

“Hold on, hold on,” Matthew said, tugging on my shirt to stop me from running. The gym shoes felt big and clunky, like ten pound weighs on the bottom of my feet. I wasn’t used to wearing shoes. Around the house, all I did was walk barefoot. “What’s the hurry?” Matthew asked, and when I turned to him, he could see the panic in my eyes, the fear. He could see that I was shaking. “What is it, Claire? What’s wrong?”

And I told him how I was scared of the cars, the clouds, the naked trees that shivered in the cold November air. Of the kids who peered from behind curtains of their own homes, the kids with the bikes and the chalk, and their mean names: dickhead, retard.

And that’s when Matthew clasped me by the hand, something he’d never done before. No one had held my hand for a real long time, not since Momma did when I was a girl. It felt good, Matthew’s hand somehow warm though mine was made up of ice cubes.

Matthew and I kept walking, down the block and around a corner, where he dragged me to a funny blue sign. “This is our stop,” he said. I didn’t know what that meant: our stop. But I followed him over to the sign where we stood and waited for a real long time. There were others there, too, other people hovering around the sign. Just waiting.

Matthew let go of my hand to feel around in his pants pocket for a handful of coins, and when he did, the cold November air whooshed up and snatched my hair. A car lurched by, with music that was loud and mad. I felt suddenly as if it was hard to breathe, as though I was choking on that raw air, like everyone was looking at me. What you can’t see, can’t hurt you, I reminded myself, and I pressed in close to Matthew, trying to forget the cold air, the loud music, the brassy eyes.

A big bus—white and blue with tinted black windows—came to a stop right before us. Matthew said, “This is our bus,” and we climbed up the huge steps with the other people, and feeling me hesitate, Matthew said, “It’s okay. No one’s gonna hurt you,” before dropping a handful of quarters in a machine and leading me down the dirty aisle to a hard blue seat. The bus lurched forward, and I felt as though I was gonna fall from my seat, onto the dirty floor. I stared at that floor, the one with an oozing soda can and an old candy wrapper and the gook from someone else’s shoes.

“Where are we going?” I asked Matthew again, and again he said, “You’ll see,” as the bus seesawed down the busy street, pitching me back and forth on that hard plastic seat, stopping every block or so to let more and more people on, until the bus nearly burst with folks.

I did what I usually did when I was scared. I thought of Momma, with her long black hair and her blue eyes. I thought back to Ogallala. Just whatever random memories I could bring to mind. They were few and far between these days: stuff like riding on the back of the shopping cart at Safeway, staring at an abandoned grocery list the last shopper left behind in the basket of the cart, the blue ink smeared across the page in a billowing cursive I couldn’t read—with Lily tucked in the seat. I thought about biting into a ripe ol’ peach and laughing with Momma as the juice dripped from my chin, and sitting under that huge oak tree that nearly consumed the backyard of our prefab home, reading to Momma from books that were meant for adults only to read.

“If you were so scared, why didn’t you tell Matthew you didn’t want to go?”

I thought about that for a minute or two. I watched Louise Flores nibble a prepackaged shortbread cookie and I thought about her question. I was scared for a whole bunch of reasons. I was scared about the people outside the home, but even more than that, I was scared about Joseph finding out we’d been gone. I knew in my mind that Joseph was at work, and that Isaac would be at school first, followed up by an after school job as was usually the case, but still, I wasn’t so sure. And Miriam? Well, Miriam hardly knew when I was there so she’d hardly know when I wasn’t. But still, I was scared.

So why didn’t I tell Matthew I didn’t want to go then? It was simple really. I did want to go. I was terrified, but I was excited, too. I hadn’t been out of that house for a long time. I was fourteen or fifteen by then. Getting out of that home was the third biggest wish I’d had for six long years, the first being that Momma and Daddy come back to life, and the second being to get Lily back. My Lily. I trusted Matthew like I hadn’t trusted anyone in the past six years, even more than Ms. Amber Adler who’d come to the home in Ogallala with the police officer to tell Lily and me that our folks were dead, as she kneeled down before me on the laminate flooring and with the kindest smile on her simple face, promised to take care of Lily and me and find us a good home.

I never thought for once that she was lying. In her mind she did just exactly what she said.

But Matthew was different. If Matthew said everything was okay, then everything was okay. If he said no one would hurt me, then no one would hurt me. It didn’t mean I wasn’t terrified as we hopped off one blue-and-white bus and onto another—and then yet another—thinking of as many memories of Momma as I could possibly dredge up (Mrs. Dahl and her cattle, Momma’s taste for banana and mayonnaise sandwiches or the way she would eat all the way around the crust first, saving the insides—the guts she called them—for last) because thinking of Momma helped quash that notion of being scared half to death.