She heard Willa suck her breath in between her teeth. It sounded chilly and impersonal, the whistle of an ill wind. When she spoke again, her voice was tight and controlled.

“Bo’s not into any bad news now, is he?”

There was none of the loose warmth that Willa’s vowels normally slid around in—they seemed mired in something cold and congealed.

Lyn took a moment to reply. Was Bo into any bad news? Of his own accord? More than the everyday bad news he had to swallow and shoulder and wade through and wear down? Nothing more than that. No, Bo wasn’t into any bad news. Not the kind Willa was intimating. Lyn kept her calm.

“No, ma’am, he sure isn’t. He’s studying for the imp-cats, you know.”

“The MCATs,” Willa corrected testily.

Willa knew Lyn knew all about the MCATs. Knew she wasn’t actually correcting her, but merely pointing out the slight speech impediment that crept into Lyn’s pronunciations when she got agitated. Which was rare—Lyn was usually too disengaged to get at all riled, so her speech stayed steady. Willa felt cruel for having caused the distress, and petty for mocking its consequences.

“Yes, ma’am. Imp-cats. M . . . CATs,” Lyn said.

“I just didn’t expect them to spend so much time together,” Willa continued.

She was trying to explain, but was only making it worse.

“Mmm-huh” was the reply.

“Well, I’m sure she’ll be back soon. Will we be seeing you Thursday?”

“Mmm-huh.”

Willa walked herself around the kitchen to try and straighten herself out. She’d offended Lyn, she knew, and she’d confused herself even further. What could she do to make it up? Maybe a yellowcake. Lyn always loved yellowcake.

She’d just cracked an egg and shaken away the unpleasant memory of cracking a fertilized one years ago—oh, the unwelcome surprise of embryonic development when all you wanted was breakfast—when she saw the headlights turn into the drive.

 

Jiminy felt like a better version of herself around Bo. She was less shy, less nervous, more curious, more lively. She hoped he’d been enjoying himself, too, and that she was more than just a mildly entertaining diversion from dry medical texts. But they hadn’t discussed how they felt. They hadn’t had physical contact besides friendly shoulder squeezes and high fives on the makeshift basketball court. Which was appropriate, Jiminy knew, at least where Fayeville was concerned. Anything more than a friendship would be frowned upon—even still, even today. Even so, Jiminy had let herself imagine a romance, and recognized that anticipating the disapproval it would engender actually made it that much more tempting to her. She was annoyed at herself for this—for harboring impure motivations. She believed she should want something solely for the thing itself, not because it was surprising or controversial. Because she was falling short, she felt as tainted as the town, and this shielded her from delusions of moral superiority.

Jiminy wasn’t thinking about any of this at the moment, however. She couldn’t think of anything besides what she’d just experienced. In fact, she wasn’t positive she’d ever be able to think about anything else again.

At her cajoling, Bo had taken her to visit the crazy old great-uncle who’d talked of his aunt Lyn’s past when no one else would. Bo’s Uncle Fred lived on a hilltop two counties over, forty minutes away, and he’d proven as loquacious as advertised.

“If it isn’t Mr. Bojangles!” he exclaimed as they pulled up to his sprawling, chaotic abode.

There was a house amid the clutter, but you had to look hard for it. A tree was growing through Fred’s front porch, and a couch and coffee table sat in the yard. There was an inside-out feeling to the whole place, as if it had been scooped up by a tornado, churned around, and spat back out in no particular order. Plants, animals, and furniture spilled all over one another. It was almost a caricature of a backwoods eccentric’s lair.

“And who’ve ya brung?” Fred bellowed. “Who’ve ya brung with ya, Mr. Bojangles?”

“Hey, Uncle Fred. This is my friend Jiminy,” Bo answered.

Fred had rushed toward them, surprisingly fast for a man so frail and gnarled, and peered intently at Jiminy’s face.

“There’s only one Jiminy,” he said finally. “You must be someone else.”

Jiminy had been holding her breath without realizing it. She exhaled then, keeping her gaze steady. Fred’s eyes were rheumy but bright.

“I must be,” she agreed.

And then the three of them had sat in Fred’s outdoor living room, surrounded by strutting peacocks, and talked for hours.

Now, as the car rolled slowly homeward, Jiminy’s head was stuffed with more of a story than she knew what to do with. She felt it pressing against the back of her eyes and welling up in her throat, threatening to overwhelm her.

“You okay?” Bo asked.

Jiminy considered. What a question, given what they now knew. How could she be, really? How could anyone? She could still hear Fred’s words echoing in her head.

“They hunted ’em,” he’d said. “They hunted Jiminy and Edward and they got ’em. Ran Edward’s car off the road and drug ’em out and shot ’em. Threw ’em in the river, burned their car. Don’t know who exactly—thing is, it coulda been any of ’em. It coulda been all of ’em. That’s the way things were.”

Listening to Fred, Jiminy had cried long, stringy tears and felt herself unraveling.

“But why?” she’d asked.

Fred picked some mites off a peacock chick while he let the question hang. It took a full minute of silence before Jiminy had understood its significance and regretted her question. There was no attaching rationality to such a thing. Darkness knew no bounds.

As they were saying their goodbyes a little later, Fred had offered Jiminy a handkerchief.

“She shone too bright is why,” he said, before ducking back into his falling-down, inside-out home.

Jiminy pondered this now, twisting Fred’s handkerchief between her fingers. She didn’t realize that she was shaking.

“J?” Bo asked, lightly touching her arm. “You okay?”

She pulled herself together.

“As okay as possible,” she replied.

Bo nodded, looking older than he ever had. He turned off the road into Willa’s long driveway, careful to slow down for the gravel.

“You need any more company?” he asked quietly, as he pulled up to the house.

Through the window that looked like it needed cleaning, Jiminy could see her grandmother in the kitchen and was struck by how powerfully she resembled her mother.

“I’ll be all right,” she replied, as she climbed from the car.

She was already out before it occurred to her how selfish her shock had made her. Bo had more reason to be upset, after all. She bent her knees and leaned into the open window.

“Oh God, what about you?” she asked, her voice full of concern.

Bo smiled a smile that seemed more a part of the frown genre.

“I’m okay,” he said.

Jiminy was unconvinced.

“Really, I’m okay,” Bo repeated, making an effort to sound more reassuring. “I’m good.”

Jiminy sighed. Whatever their emotional state, she agreed that he was. Which was saying something, in this world.

 

Willa wiped some flour off her arm and tried to compose her face into a mellow arrangement, away from its mask of worry.

“Hi,” Jiminy said, as she walked into the kitchen.

“Oh, hello,” Willa replied pleasantly. “I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to make a yellowcake. It’s Lyn’s favorite.”

Jiminy nodded, but Willa felt like her granddaughter was staring right through her, out somewhere behind her body, beyond these walls.

After a long moment, Jiminy focused her saucer eyes back on her grandmother’s.

“Tell me about Edward and Jiminy,” she commanded.

Willa felt a tightening in her chest, and reached behind her for the counter edge to sink against.