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I snap.
    “Keep taking your pills, girly,” he says. “Or they’re gonna lock you up. I heard what you did.”
    “Excuse me?” I draw up to my full height and channel my mother’s aggressive lawyer anger.
    “I remember your best little girlfriend. Carly.” At the sound of her name, I can no longer breathe. “When she passed on, you went plum crazy. Pulled a knife on somebody, I heard. And they locked you away for a while.” He looks me up and down with a lazy grin. “Looks like they let you out too soon. You give me any trouble, they’ll send you back where you came from.”
    I draw a shaky breath.
    “I didn’t pull a knife on anyone,” I say, but my voice wavers and kind of turns the words into a question. There are holes in my memory, but that’s a big piece to forget. Surely I would remember something like that. No one would let me back in school if I had done that. Right?
    Old Murph pushes away from the wall and winks at me.
    “You just watch yourself, sugar,” he says as he shuffles down the hall. I’ve never noticed before, but his back is hunched, and he has a slight limp. I guess I’ve never really looked at him; I just have this mental image of a creepy old guy. But there’s something about him that bothers me. Do I imagine that his hair is moving, the greasy gray strands waving like feelers?
    Shuddering, I slip into the girls’ dressing room and lock the door behind me. My headache still hasn’t gone away, and I’m starting to regret flushing my pills. I’m seeing things that aren’t there,and Tamika said I went psycho at Carly’s funeral, and now the old man says I pulled a knife on somebody. Maybe I was crazy.
    Maybe I am crazy.
    And maybe I’ll go home and confess to my mom and ask her to buy a new bottle of pills. Maybe it’s better to be fuzzy and numb than to see things that aren’t there. Scary things that I’d rather not see. But the whole reason I got out of the fog was to go back to the Paper Moon Coffee Shop and look for signs of Carly. When I saw her last week, I was on my pills.
    Without them what will I see tonight?

6
    AFTER CHANGING INTO MY REGULAR clothes, I Make sure the hall is empty before I head out the door. I don’t want to see Old Murph, and I don’t want to see the fox-hat girl. The long, green passage is as dark and empty as ever, but it has lost the veil of comfort that used to hide its faults. I can see the flaking paint, the fissures in the brick underneath. Everything is a little too crooked, like part of a fun house. I hurry out the side door and shut it gently behind me.
    It’s late afternoon, and concrete-gray clouds are slowly turning lavender. The air has some bite to it, and I huddle inside my hoodie. Rehearsal should go on for another hour, so I have time to hit the Paper Moon without Baker, which is how I wanted it anyway. I text him to say that I’ll swing back by to pick him up when I’m done.
    As I stow my backpack in my trunk and slam it closed, I hear a shifting shuffle farther down the alley. Probably another mangy and forgotten pet displaced by the hurricane. The city had to round up and euthanize a bunch of dogs that went feral and mauled some kid in the streets last year. I hurry back out to the sidewalk, where the antiques store lady glares at me again. I meet her eyes as I walk past, and she doesn’t blink, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move. Like she’s just another old statue, rotting in place as the city crumbles.
    I move through downtown as the natives do, eyes down, arms close, huddled over. Everything about me says, Not a target , because anyone walking alone in this area is most definitely a target now that the people on the street are more desperate than ever. My fingers find the pink plastic bead in the pocket of my jeans, and I roll it back and forth like a prayer.
    Keeping to the safer sidewalks, I pass mansions and crack houses and museums and bars. Sometimes the only difference between them is a fresh coat of paint or a