She tried again. This time she managed it: it was an ugly bird, rudimentary, but it should work.

Birds are harbingers. She remembered sitting at the kitchen table when she was six or seven, in front of vast piles of paper birds. Her mom was making cranes, crows, swans—her fingers moving quickly, practically a blur, until the whole table was covered with them. Was that in Delaware? St. Louis? She remembered a river sparkling in the distance; she was never allowed to go near it.

Dea launched the bird into the air. For a second, it fluttered unsteadily, just a scrap of paper towel in the stale air of an old deli.

Then it changed. Its wings stiffened and sprouted white feathers. Its tail unfolded.

Dea pushed open the door as the dove swooped out into the street. She plunged into the cold. The snow felt like tiny bites on her skin. There was no light left in the street—no light from anywhere in the world, except for the small window high above them. Connor’s house.

Dimly, she heard screaming. But it was worse than screaming. Explosions so loud they made colors pop behind her eyes. Boom. She ran, stumbling, following the dove as it wove through the air, wings speckled with black snow. Boom. She didn’t turn around, didn’t look back, didn’t realize she was crying. Boom. She left Connor behind, left the screaming behind, left the Christmas lights still blinking, earthbound, beaming up a message to the sky: Kiss me.

Boom.

She sat up, breathing hard, fighting back a scream. Her room was cold but she was sweating. She groped for the light on her bedroom table, and could have sobbed with relief when suddenly her room was revealed—all hard angles and planes, nubby carpet and water-stained desk, faded curtains—real, real, real.

Boom. She jumped. But it was only her mom, pounding on her door. The sound must have reached her even in Connor’s dream.

“Dea? Dea? Are you awake?”

She was so shaken from the nightmare, and the vision of men with no faces, that she forgot that she and her mom weren’t speaking. She shoved Connor’s swim medal under her pillow, as though Miriam would see it and know what Dea had done. She swept her hair back into a ponytail and checked the clock on her bedside table. Six thirty a.m. She wondered, briefly, whether Connor was still in the middle of that nightmare.

Where had those horrible monsters come from?

“Unlock the door, Dea. I need to talk to you.”

Her legs felt sore, as if she’d actually run a long distance in the snow. As soon as she unlocked the door, she crawled back into bed.

It had been a while—at least a month—since Miriam had been in Dea’s room. She entered cautiously, as if afraid that the piles of clothing on the floor might conceal a deadly snake, and stopped a few feet from Dea’s bed.

“What is it?” Dea pulled her covers to her chin.

“Are you all right?” Miriam said. She looked pale and pinched and worried, as if the past few weeks had worked on her like a gravitational force, sucking out her center. “I heard you cry out.”

“I’m fine,” Dea said.

“Were you walking?”

“No,” Dea lied. And then realized it was a stupid thing to say. She and her mother didn’t dream. Why else would she have cried out? “Yeah,” she said. “Something stupid. There were bugs. Why’d you wake me?”

“I need to go take care of a few things,” Miriam said, turning to the window. She parted the curtains with two fingers and peered out into the darkness, and Dea had a sudden moment of terror: the men would be there, breathing their ragged breaths onto the glass. But of course, there was no one. Just the reflection of Dea’s room in the darkened windowpanes.

“At six thirty in the morning?”

Miriam let the curtains drop, but didn’t turn around. “Start packing your things. It’s time.”

Dea took a deep breath. Her lungs ached, as if the cold from Connor’s dream had infected her. “You aren’t serious.”

“There’s no point in getting angry. It won’t change anything.” Miriam picked her way through the clothes back to the door. She didn’t even look sorry, or embarrassed, or anything but faintly impatient, as if the conversation were keeping her from more important things.

Dea closed her eyes and reopened them. How many other mornings had her mom woken her up saying the very same thing? I have some things to take care of. Start packing. It’s time.

She didn’t know if she was angry or not. She couldn’t think straight.

“I won’t go,” she managed to say.

“Yes, you will,” Miriam said matter-of-factly. She paused with her hand on the doorknob. For a second, Dea thought she might apologize. But she just said, “Your suitcase is in the attic,” and passed into the hall, closing the door behind her.

Dea sat in her bed for a long time. She heard the front door close and the locks turn, one after another. She heard the growl of the car engine. She heard Toby, mewling to be fed. She didn’t have the energy to move. She didn’t have the energy to cry.

Eight o’clock. Toby yowled a little louder, and clawed Dea’s door. Thin shafts of sunlight, fine as silk, passed between her curtains. It was going to be a nice day. She, Connor, and Gollum were supposed to go to Lesalle to check out the Fright Festival, a cheesy Halloween-themed carnival that would last all the way until Thanksgiving. Connor had promised to win them each a stuffed goblin from one of the shoot-’em-up booths.

By nine o’clock, she’d made a decision.

She got out of bed. Toby was still mewling outside the door, but she ignored him. She didn’t have that many clothes, and many of the clothes she did own were scattered across the bedroom floor. In both closets there were maybe a dozen sweaters and ratty thrift store sweatshirts, a few skirts she never wore, and a dress her mom had given her a few Christmases ago, which was shaped like an inverted martini glass and had beaded skulls embroidered all over it. She’d never had anywhere to wear it.

She could have worn it to prom. Maybe Connor would have asked her officially, like as a couple.

She pulled down all the clothes, and the hangers, too, for good measure. She dumped them all on the floor, kicking a pair of jeans under her bed, tossing a sweatshirt over the radiator. In the hall, she nudged Toby out of the way with a foot.

She hardly ever went into her mom’s room. Whenever she did, she felt like she was seeing the stage lights come on after a play, and suddenly noticing all the bolts and screws keeping the whole thing together: a sense of awe and also of embarrassment, because the deception had been so easily believed. The room was spotless, as always. Two clocks hung side by side above the headboard and clucked their tongues at Dea. Two suitcases, already half-filled, were open on the bedroom floor. The closets were empty. The bed was stripped, the comforter rolled back to reveal the mattress.

She inverted the suitcases onto the floor, kicking and hurling the neatly folded clothing into various corners of the room. She pulled the comforter and pillows off the bed. She shook out the contents of her mom’s vanity drawer—used tubes of cream, nail files, sample perfumes from department stores—onto the rug. In the bathroom, she found two plastic ziplock bags filled with toiletries. She squeezed the toothpaste all over the sink and uncapped an old tube of her mom’s lipstick.

I’m not going, she wrote on the bathroom wall, where a mirror had once hung.

Feeling slightly better, she went downstairs and fed Toby. Instead of returning the cat food to the pantry, she shook the bag out all over the kitchen floor. Toby watched her, uncertain, crouched over his bowl. She knew she was being immature, but she didn’t care. If her mom wanted to leave, fine. But Dea was sure as hell not going to make it any easier for her.

“Go nuts,” she said to Toby, once the kitchen floor was covered with a surface of hard brown pellets, so it was impossible to walk without crunching. She didn’t bother to throw out the empty bag—just tossed it in a corner. The kitchen clock sounded nine-thirty, dinging shrilly, as if in protest. For good measure, she wrenched it off the wall, tossed it onto the kitchen counter, and smashed it to pieces with an old meat tenderizer that had been abandoned by the house’s previous tenants. It let out a faint whine before it died completely, like something alive.