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instead of looking away again Penny forced a smile. “Hi Zoe.”
    “Hi … I brought you this.” She held out an old and clearly well-read paperback book, a Year’s Best Horror Stories that was older than both of them put together. “I noticed you like scary stories, so …”
    “It’s great,” Penny said, and meant it. Not the book—Penny thought this one looked especially cheesy, even for a book of horror stories—but that Zoe had brought it. Maybe what Penny had mistaken for snobbery was just shyness. “Thanks.”
    Zoe looked up then, even smiled. “You wanna go hang out for a bit?”
     

 
Chapter 6
    The Fox’s Game
    Within the hour, Penny knew as much about Zoe as she ever had about any of her friends from the city.
    Zoe had moved to Dogwood at the end of the last school year to live with her grandmother while her mom and dad pursued careers as over-the-road truck drivers.
    “It’s just for a few months,” she said. “They’ll get tired of it pretty soon and come back for me.”
    Penny couldn’t help but notice that Zoe didn’t seem completely convinced of this. She avoided Penny’s eyes for a second, fiddling with a hole in the knee of her jeans.
    “My dad’s an Indian. For a while I stayed with my other grandma on the reservation, but I didn’t like it there much, so they said I could come here.”
    “Do you like it here?”
    Zoe shrugged. “It’s okay, I guess. I like Sullivan’s and the rock shop, but I don’t have any friends here.”
    “Me either,” Penny said. “I just moved in with Susan. She’s cool, but my closest neighbor is that little booger with the mullet.”
    Zoe laughed. “Lucky you.”
    There was a nervous silence, the kind that grew harder to kill with every second it survived. Then, much to Penny’s relief, Zoe ended it. “Have you seen the rock shop yet?”
    “No,” Penny said, glancing back toward the Golden Arts. The display window that had still been dark the only time she’d taken a good look in it, now glowed with bright fluorescent light.
    “Let’s go,” Zoe said. “You’ll love it…they’ve got the prettiest rocks in there.”
    Penny had to work to keep up with the taller girl’s strides. Crossing the street halfway between intersections, Penny shot nervous looks up and down. The lack of morning rush-hour traffic still unnerved her.
    They passed Sullivan’s, and she saw Susan smiling at them through the window. They waved, and she waved back.
    The bell over Golden Arts’ door jingled, and she had to rush to catch it before it swung shut again. She found Zoe inside, striding toward an open door set in the far wall.
    An old man behind the glass display counter nodded at Zoe and said, “Morning, Zoe.”
    Then his eyes fell on Penny, and he flinched as if goosed.
    Penny gave a little wave, which he returned, and he watched her all the way through the showroom door as she caught up with Zoe.
    Penny found Zoe standing at the end of a long table, pawing through a bin of loose stones. “What’s with that guy?”
    “Dunno,” Zoe said, showing zero interest.
    While the main floor of the shop looked like any other low-end jewelry store Penny had ever been inside, the smaller back room was a warehouse of rough gemstones, crystals, and strange minerals. Shelves crowded with displays of sparkling stones, opened amethyst geodes, great shining lumps of fool’s gold, and interesting formations of unidentifiable crystals covered the walls. A row of display shelves dissected the room.
    “Weird,” Penny said, staring around.
    “I want to be a geologist,” Zoe said. “I love minerals and gems.”
    “You’ll make a good one too,” said the old man from the doorway.
    He reached into the stone bin, plucking a handful of stones at random. “What’r these?”
    Zoe grinned, and named them, one by one. “Carnelian, Jasper, Obsidian, and Turquoise.”
    “And this one?” He held up a blue crystal, Penny’s favorite of the bunch.
    Zoe, however, seemed