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Jackson right through the center of a group of women who are laughing and talking about girls’ night and some guy’s abs. We’ve cut through a few large groups, but this time it hits me. “They don’t see us,” I blurt.
    He slows just long enough for me to catch up. “No, but somewhere in their subconscious, they sense our presence.”
    “Wow. You strung more than ten words together and offered information voluntarily.” I don’t know why I say it. There’s just something that makes me want to needle him. Maybe because it distracts me from being afraid. But I regret the lost opportunity to ask more questions when he clips out, “I’m already regretting it.”
    He doesn’t look at me when I mutter, “Dish it out but can’t take it.”
    “Ten,” he says.
    “What?”
    “You said I strung more than ten words together. But I didn’t. I strung together precisely ten.”
    My jaw goes slack and I can’t think of a single snappy comeback.
    I jog in silence for a few seconds before I hear, “Give me a j .” I glance over to see Richelle beside me, doing a high V, moving her hands like she’s holding pom-poms. She repeats the movement and trills, “Give me a k .” Her brows lift. “I’ll let you fill in the two letters in between. Try e and r .”
    I mentally add the letters and huff out a laugh.
    “That’s our Jackson,” she says with a wink.
    “You’re on the squad.”
    “What gave it away?” She gestures at her outfit and grins. “My mom wanted me to be at the top like she was, but I’m a base. That means I’m the one on the bottom, lifting the flyer into her stunt. Which is actually fine with me. I wouldn’t want to be the one at the top. I’m scared of heights.” She looks me over, then asks, “You?”
    I shake my head. “No squad for me. I run.”
    There’s a surreal quality to this conversation. It’s so ordinary. And our situation . . . isn’t. We’re jogging along the Vegas strip on a mission to hunt aliens. It hits me then that I’ve accepted that fact. I know I’m not dreaming or fantasizing. This is real .
    “Track team?” Richelle asks.
    “No.” I shake my head. “I’m not much of a team player. That’s Luka’s thing. I run just for me.”
    She laughs, but there’s an edge to it. “Good for you. Sometimes I think I’m so busy trying to make my mom proud, doing everything exactly as she wants me to do, I forget to do anything for me.”
    “What would you want to do?”
    “That’s the question, isn’t it? I guess I need to figure out where Mom’s ideas end and mine begin.”
    We turn onto a quieter street. Richelle’s jogging along beside me, and I shock the hell out of myself when I say in a rush, “My mom’s dead. SCLC. Small cell lung cancer.” On my fourteenth birthday, she was laughing and chasing me into the waves at Atlantic Beach. We’d been going to North Carolina, renting the same oceanfront cottage my whole life. But that birthday everything changed. I remember the wave taking her under. I remember her coming up coughing. And coughing. I don’t think she ever stopped coughing after that. Four months later, she was dead. Four months . Chemo and radiation didn’t help worth shit. “I made my father put a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in her coffin along with the photos he chose of me and him and all of us together.” I pause, remembering that, remembering all the times my parents sat watching TV or reading the paper, a cloud of smoke hanging over them. “I was that angry.”
    “Maybe you still are,” Richelle says.
    I stop dead, because I can’t believe I’ve told her all this—I never talk about it. Not even with Carly. Never —and because I can’t believe a girl I’ve only just met hit the nail so precisely on the head.
    I turned sixteen last month, and it was just me and Dad at Atlantic Beach, running into the ocean with our memories. I pretended the salty streaks on my face were from the waves.
    So did he.
    I pretended my