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that Molly didn’t want to duck back into the apartment to make a sandwich, and her mother couldn’t get her lunch. Louise had locked herself in the bedroom, suffering from one of her “migraines”—those times when she couldn’t cope and ended up chasing a few sleeping pills with spoonfuls of applesauce. It had been some time since Molly believed her mother had real headaches, and some time since Louise thought she was fooling her daughter, but they both still played along.
    Molly had been starving, her stomach curling around itself and making noises worthy of the Chamber of Horrors. She decided to order some fried mozzarella sticks from across the street, have them delivered. Tobias showed up not long after that, styrofoam container balanced in one hand. “Hey,” he said. “Molly, right?”
    She nodded. “How much do I owe you again?”
    “Five thirty.”
    She gave him seven dollars from the cash drawer. As he reached for it, he noticed her Bible open on the counter. “Job, huh? I read that today, too. You working through the one-year schedule?”
    “Yeah, the one online.”
    “Me too. Wicked cool.” And he looked at her, the way she’d once looked at a drab, dusty brown owlet moth in her father’s tweezers—him holding it up to the desk lamp, her at first finding it startlingly dull compared to the brightlycolored butterflies in cases around the room and not any different than the hundreds of stupid moths that bumped around the porch lights every night.
    But when Daddy told her this moth had special organs in their ears that could pick up bat sonar, and they flopped to the ground when they heard it so the bats couldn’t eat them, the boring bug suddenly became special. And she saw it not as a pesky thing that stupidly chased the hallway lamp when she opened the front door, getting trapped in the house to die there, but as something with value.
    Molly had that value now in Tobias’s eyes. Before that day, he had waved a few times but was just as likely to ignore her. He’d delivered pizza or subs or calzones to the apartment every four or five months. But now, he said, “Maybe I can come over sometime and we can talk about the readings.”
    “Okay.”
    “Awesome. Wow. This was really a God thing, wasn’t it?”
    She had to agree it was. And since that day he had stopped in nearly every day, some excuse or another in his pocket, and Molly told herself that he was, like herself, lonely. He’d told her more than once he didn’t fit with his family, that they were content on Dorsett Island and he wasn’t, that they wanted him to stay on with the business forever, and he planned to go to medical school, Lord willing. “And,” he said, “they’re Catholics. So they totally don’t get me.”
    Molly had been so thankful for a friend. And now she’d gone and ruined it.
    She rammed the door shut, locked it again, and ran back into the museum, through the first three exhibit rooms, to the workshop door hidden behind a musty black curtain. Every time she moved it aside to get through, her nose filled withdust and she’d sneeze, like now, covering the bottom half of her face with her sleeved arm. She knew instinctively where the pull was to the light; three steps in she swept her arm through the air around her head until the balled chain caught her fingers. She tugged. On burst the light, and she flinched at the body parts strewn over the workbench, dangling on hooks, staring down at her from shelves. She still wasn’t used to that initial inhuman sight.
    The arms hung against one wall, with the legs, and she chose three she thought could be the right size, or close enough. Back through the curtain, another two sneezes—she always sneezed in twos—and into the lobby, where she undressed Elvis to the waist. Some of the figures were wax through and through, but others, like this one, had wax heads and arms, and occasionally legs, screwed onto mannequin bodies. She chose the replacement arm that seemed