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laughed.
    “Yeah, but those are the best kind of stories, right? I like ones that take you by surprise.”
    “Me too.”
    “And it was based on a true story.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah. It happened not far from here. Obviously, I wasn’t there . So I made a lot of it up. But the police really did find what was left of the guy when they went to his house.”
    “Wow. I didn’t hear about that.”
    “A friend told me.” Jenny nodded at the door. “You heading out?”
    “Yeah.”
    I zipped my bag shut and we left together.
    “Where did you get the idea for your story?” she said.
    And again, I felt embarrassed. My story was about a man walking through the town he’d grown up in, making his way back to his childhood home. In my head, he was being hunted for something, and wanted to revisit the past one last time—go back to a place where the world had still felt open and full of possibilities. It wasn’t clear whether he made it home or not; I ended it just as he was arriving at his old street, with sirens in the distance. I’d pretended to myself that it was clever and literary to be ambiguous like that, but in truth, I hadn’t been able to think of a better way to finish it.
    “Have you read The Stand ?” I said.
    I wasn’t expecting her to have, but her eyes widened.
    “Oh God, yeah. I love Stephen King! And I get it now. The Walkin’ Dude, right?”
    “Yeah, yeah.” Her enthusiasm fired my own a little. “That guy really stuck with me … even though, you know, he turns out to be the Devil or whatever. But at the beginning, when he’s just walking, and you don’t really know why? I liked that a lot.”
    “I did too.”
    “Have you read any other Stephen King books?”
    “All of them.”
    “ All of them? ”
    “Yeah, of course.” She looked at me as if the idea of not reading all of them was insane. “He’s my favorite author. I’ve read most of them two or three times. At least, I mean.”
    “Wow.”
    Later, I would learn how true this was. Jenny was a voracious reader. Partly that was because her family was poor and books werea cheap form of escapism, but it was also just the way she was. Right then, I was just amazed that she’d read more King than I had.
    “I’ve read most of them,” I said. “ Some of them more than once.”
    “Favorite?”
    “ The Shining .” I thought about it. “Maybe.”
    “Yeah, it’s difficult to pick, isn’t it? They’re all so good.”
    “What about you?”
    “ Pet Sematary .”
    “Oh God, that one’s horrible .”
    “I know—I love it.” She grinned. “The ending! Bleak. As. Fuck.”
    “And you like that?”
    “Sure. They’re meant to be horror stories, right? And obviously they are, but look at The Stand . Lots of bad things happen, but in the end the good guys basically win. And in The Shining, yeah, it’s sad and everything what happens to the dad, but the kid’s okay. Pet Sematary, though. There’s just no hope there at all.”
    I nodded, but also recognized the sad resignation in the way she said it. A part of me wanted to tell her that not all endings had to be hopeless. But then we walked out into the main playground, and faced the sea of children and the gray landscape around us, and the words wouldn’t come. On good days, it was possible to believe I was going to escape Gritten when I grew up, but the truth was that very few people around here were going to have anything but difficult, miserable lives. There was no reason to think Jenny or I were special, or that our endings would be any happier than most were.
    I looked to the right. James was waiting for me at the far end of the gymnasiums.
    I hitched my bag up on my shoulder. “I’m off this way.”
    “And I’m off the other. That’s the way it works.”
    Which seemed an odd thing to say. But then I remembered how I never saw her at breaks and lunchtimes—how she seemed to disappearin the same way as James and I did. I wondered where she went: what forgotten part of