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Brenda, but she did say “the only person that ‘helped me’ was Brenda.” Then she told him what the waitress had said about no cable, no Internet and no cell phone except on the hill—though she didn’t call it “Makeout Hill”—and told him how Mom didn’t have a car, she’d had to get groceries herself (“Just like always”), and how hard it had been to sleep on a mattress “from 1800.” She told him she needed more money on her card (“if I’m going to have to keep buying groceries”) a new mattress, and a motor scooter. Her first draft came off way too…mean. She revised it a couple of times; her dad could be sensitive, and the last thing she needed was to get him upset…only to have Brenda there to comfort him. She put in a lot more about how Gramma had specifically put that jewelry in the will for her to have and no one else. When she thought it sounded reasonable, she tried sending it.
    It took almost fifteen tries, and her waving the cell frantically over her head, before it finally went out. She sighed, stuck her phone back in her pocket, and took a look at the neighborhood before she climbed back in. It wasn’t much better from this vantage, and she still couldn’t see any people. But maybe they were all at work.
    Then she climbed back inside the attic, though she left the window open for now. It looked out over the backyard—which was a weedy wilderness—but if she found anything up here that was useful, it would probably be a better idea to pitch it out the window than to try hauling it down the stairs. Anything up here would probably be full of pounds of dust. And maybe dead bugs.
    There were some locked trunks she was kind of itching to break into, just because they were locked. They certainly weren’t her mother’s, and she had to find some way to entertain herself. Maybe another day. There were some open ones that were full of chewed-on cloth that smelled like old mice. Ew. She guessed the cloth was old blankets, linens and curtains, but there was nothing there she was even remotely interested in trying to use.
    Finally, in the far corner, she found a featherbed wrapped up in yellowed plastic. She only knew it was a featherbed because she’d slept on one before, when she and Dad had gone up to Vermont to ski and stayed at a little bed and breakfast place instead of one of the lodges. That trip hadn’t gone well so far as the skiing was concerned; there hadn’t been enough snow and all of the beginner slopes were closed, so they’d gone back home after one night. The featherbed had been all right, though. Had to be more comfortable than that antique mattress, anyway.
    After an initial struggle, she managed to stuff it out the window; it rolled down the roof and pitched into the unmowed grass, sending up a cloud of dust. She wondered if Mom was expecting her to do the mowing, the way Mom always seemed to expect her to do most of the housework. Well, unless a fairy turned up and materialized a brand new mower, that was just not going to happen.
    Even if a mower did materialize… I’m gonna have to be pretty bored before I go mowing a lawn for fun. But in this town, that might not be such a ridiculous possibility.
    She plodded down the stairs, after making sure her phone was still in her pocket. There had been something that looked like a wire tennis racquet in one corner; that would do for beating the hell out of the featherbed. She managed to get the thing draped over the fence and beat on it until her arms were sore, then dragged it back inside just as it was starting to get dark. You couldn’t say “the sun was setting,” since you couldn’t see the sun through all the overcast.
    When the bed was done—and it was somewhat more comfortable than just the mattress alone had been—she realized that she was starving and more tired than she ever remembered being in her entire life. It took an act of will to go down to the kitchen and heat up a frozen dinner. There hadn’t been