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the days right after I’d gotten out of Patterson, Mom never would’ve let a statement like that pass. But now she changed the subject.
    “Your father will be home tomorrow—if those thunderstorms in New York don’t hold him up. Although I’d rather have them ground the planes than fly in that kind of weather. I don’t know if they’ll even let him take off from London if it’s such a mess here . . .”
    After a full analysis of the weather and air traffic on both sides of the Atlantic, she trailed off. “Don’t you want to come inside?” she asked.
    “Not yet.”
    She hesitated another minute before sliding the glass door shut. But she stood in the living room, waiting. I waited, too; she didn’t move. I hated being watched that way.
    Heat gathered in my leg muscles, compressed energy. I shook my legs out and realized they wanted to run. For weeks I’d thought about starting to run again, and I’d been on the verge of doing it, but something kept stopping me. But tonight all I felt around me was the summer air.
    When the mosquitoes needled my skin faster than I could slap them, I came inside. “Well,” Mom said brightly, “going to bed now?”
    “I guess.”
    She watched me climb the stairs. “Show’s over,” I mumbled, but not loud enough for her to hear.
    Upstairs in my room, I checked for messages. I would’ve loved to tell Val about Nicki’s plan and see if she thought the whole idea was as crazy as I did, but she wasn’t around.
    • • • • •

    Nicki had told me to come to her house. Kent would drive us into Seaton and drop us off. Not that Kent knew we were on a secret psychic mission to contact his dead father. He had something else to do in town, and Nicki had threatened to disembowel me if I told him what our appointment was for.
    The Thorntons lived down on Route 7, in a box of a house with a lawn that was more dirt than grass. Someone had once brought a pile of mulch or compost to the yard, as if planning a project, but the lump had sat there long enough to sprout weeds.
    Kent’s eyebrows rose when he saw me with Nicki, but he didn’t say anything. He jingled his keys and nodded at the car, inviting us to get in. Nicki got in front and fiddled with the radio. I sat in back. She turned up the music so loud that Kent couldn’t have talked to us if he wanted to. The road shimmered, seemed to melt.
    I tried to read tension or worry or hope or anything at all in the back of Nicki’s head, but I was clueless. I tried to picture the psychic, and I was clueless there, too. I imagined a woman in bright robes leaning over a crystal ball, but—did they really do that? Or was that just on TV?
    Seaton was the kind of place people meant when they said America was becoming one long series of chain stores. It had gas stations, fast-food restaurants, dry cleaners, big-box stores, and nothing you couldn’t find in a thousand other places. If you blacked out and woke up in Seaton, you’d have no idea where you were, or what part of the country you were in.
    Kent dropped us outside the post office. The August air rolled up off the road in blurry waves, scorching my lungs. I wished we were on my deck, listening to the cicadas drone. Or at the waterfall, with cold foam spilling over us.
    Nicki twined her fingers together and said, “Let’s go.” Her voice shook, and I thought about taking her hand to calm her down. But I didn’t see how I’d get my hand in between hers, to break up that nervous clench. I never touched people, anyway.
    We walked behind the post office and some warehouses. Empty plastic bags and food wrappers blew past our feet. The sidewalks were crumbling, weeds thrusting up through the cracks. The sun weighed on our shoulders; my shirt was wet already. Clear drops gathered on Nicki’s skin.
    I was curious about how this psychic would work, what she would say, whether I would catch her in any obvious tricks. “The main rule,” I said, “is that you don’t tell her