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spoken to her only a handful of times, which I replayed in my head obsessively. On the Fourth of July two months before, I had shared a whole ten minutes near her: she had taken the empty canvascamping chair next to me, placing a soda can in its mesh cup holder and adjusting her fascinating preteen body with little sighs. Eager to impress her, I had mentioned how one time Jackson and I had got our hands on some illegal fireworks from Chinatown in San Francisco, leaving out the fact that Julia had confiscated them almost immediately. Anna had beamed briefly, politely, and emptied her soda can, the last of the cola tinkling as it escaped into her lips. In the middle of the street, my father lit a foot-tall brick and held his beer bottle up triumphantly as it rained its bits of slow, mournful yellow lights twelve feet above.
    “As much as I like the fireworks,” Anna said then, “I like the smell afterward,” and sniffed as if to demonstrate. I couldn’t think of any response, and soon after she got up, leaving the aluminum can and a wake of her scent.
    It wasn’t just Anna that had been stolen. The drugstores raised their Halloween aisles from wherever they’d been hiding for a year, and our street bore less and less resemblance to the kingdom we’d galloped through laughing and planning wildly. Autumn was decidedly adult: the nuanced colors—muddled oranges and browns, the uncertain gray of the clouds—were much harder to love, to understand, than the sticky pinks of popsicles, the confident thick greens of happy grass and plants, the haughty blue of the sky above it all. I halfheartedly indulged my father’s conversations regarding my costume that year, and on the night when the boys and their mother came over to carve pumpkins on our porch, I was distracted and without my usual grandiose jack-o’-plans. I took pleasure, instead, inmaking deep, sharp stabs, cutting only sharp lines and extracting simple shapes from the flesh of the pumpkin, and removing its guts in fistfuls.
    The man who’d taken Anna had waved a knife at her friends: I wondered if somewhere he was making similar incisions, stealing her flesh in isosceles triangles and parallelograms. In my imagination this was not painful for Anna, only confusing; she would look at her body and watch the light coming through, then behind her at strange shadows she cast. As a child who’d lost her mother, I had developed a morbid and skilled imagination regarding death and human pain that I felt somehow entitled to use.
    The candle went on burning in the window of the Martins’ house, and on the night of Halloween her parents sat on the porch with candies of every variety: nougat and fruit-flavored hard candies, peanut butter cups in milk and dark chocolate, lollipops with blue gum inside them. Instead of cauldrons of dry ice, ghoulish motion detectors that cackled on a trick-or-treater’s approach, or an excess of gauze spiderwebs, their stoop was a tribute to the possibility of actual death. The flowers had not stopped coming and the bouquets bled into each other among store-bought sympathy cards and ones made of construction paper in seventh-grade homerooms: WE MISS YOU ANNA . Photographs cataloging twelve years of life were papered to the windows, the same smile replicated in different poses and ages.
    Parents had to drag their children up the stairs; some of the littler ones cried. It was strange that her parents had done this; it was courageous or it was insane. Anna’s mother worea sedated smile, clutching the hands of parents and hungrily eyeing the cowboys and grim reapers; her father distributed candy in businesslike gestures, nodding and drinking out of a red plastic cup. When we approached, my father offered his hand but I shook it off. I maintained eye contact with the mother of the stolen girl until she broke it; I felt Jackson staring from beside me and cast him a look of reprehension.
    As per routine, I spent Halloween night in the boys’