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on our papers when we spelled everything right, was glued to her cheek. She looked over at us, a slow, too casual glance, and we got very busy comparing the prices of Ivory and Palmolive. Without saying anything about it to each other, we knew we had gone undercover, real spies with a very real mission: follow the thief. I imagined our names in the Saint Ignatius Parish Bulletin, perhaps with a picture of us shaking Father Van Dan’s hand. I imagined Mr. Becker rewarding us with cash, prizes, maybe even a trip somewhere.
    â€œWhat should we do?” Sam whispered. The girl was headingtoward the automatic doors; they sizzled open and she disappeared, like an angel, into a pool of light.
    â€œGo pay and then meet me outside,” I said, pushing the money into his hand, and I walked quickly up the aisle and plunged into the sudden bright heat of the street outside. The girl was standing at the edge of the curb as if she were waiting for me. Her purse bulged at her side. “Hi,” I chirped, trying to be cool. “Hey,” she said noncommittally. I thought that perhaps I’d seen her before, one of several girls who liked to sit smoking on the half-wall in front of the bank. She braced herself against the telephone pole where we had left our bikes and lifted first one foot and then the other to unbuckle her silver sandals. Each had a braided noose, meant to ensnare her big toe, and I thought I’d never seen shoes that looked so terribly cruel. They reminded me of the traps my uncle Olaf kept hanging in his basement, with bits of fur still clinging to the metal. There were red marks on her toes, and she rubbed at them the way an animal licks a hurt. I wanted to touch them; I wanted to ask her name. I wanted to be beautiful in the way she was beautiful, wearing silver trap shoes and a look that shivered inside me. This was the sort of girl my mother referred to as a wild girl , and suddenly I loved the sound of those words. They made me remember my cat days, moving by instinct and intuition only, prowling through the darkness with twenty-twenty vision, striking with a neat, clean blow. Her eyes did, in fact, look like the eyes of a cat: They were narrow and green, outlined in green eyeliner, made wider and brighter by green eye shadow. For the first time, I imagined my own eyes painted: fierce, mysterious, untamed.
    By the time Sam came out with the dishwashing liquid in a paper sack, the wild girl was walking up Main Street in the same direction we’d come from, those cruel shoes swinging from her hand. “Let her walk ahead,” I told him. “If we tail her too close, she’ll get suspicious.”
    We got our bikes and crossed to the opposite side of the street, riding so slowly that we kept toppling into each other. Once, still walking, she stared back at us evenly, but then she tossed her hair and continued on, her bare feet slapping the side-walk. We had almost reached the mill when she made a military left and marched up the steps of a rectangular brick house. It was an ordinary, everyday sort of house, with a birdbath and a statue of the Virgin in the front. It did not look like the house of either a thief or a wild girl. The screen door slapped behind her; the shades were already pulled shut. The house looked forlorn, the way houses look when no one lives inside them.
    We rode around the block, buying the time we needed to come up with a plan. We rode around the block again. Finally, we left our bikes and the bottle of detergent behind the hedge across the street and scurried along the side of the house until we found an open window. Because Sam was lighter, I lifted him up for the first look, hoping there wasn’t a dog. His tennis shoes dug into my wrist, smelling of manure and grass.
    â€œI don’t see anything,” he said.
    â€œLet’s try you lifting me,” I said, and we switched places so that I could look for whatever Sam had missed that would tell us