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hard, though my dad made me figure it out rather than just telling me: the townspeople’s cars are nearly always rusting, from the bottom, because of the ocean air.
    “He’s just a guy,” I said to the voice, under my breath, as I passed a Toyota Corolla that by the red stains around its wheel arches belonged to a townie.
    “He wants to **** you and then dump your body at sea, for the crabs and fishes to eat.”
    “Please stop,” I whispered.
    Then I felt a touch on my arm and I swear my heart nearly stopped. I spun around, arms up.
    “Whoa, hey,” said the guy. He sounded like a surfer dude, his vowels long and lazy. “Easy there.”
    “Say a word to him and I’ll make you pay.”
    That was the voice, of course—so I just stood there, looking around me to see if there was anyone passing, anyone who could help me if he did want to hurt me. But there was no one; the street was empty.
    The guy peered at me, puzzled. He had washed-out eyes; there was something sad about his whole appearance. He didn’t look like a killer. “I just need directions,” he said. He took a crumpled piece of paper from his jacket. “West Construction, on Fourteenth. The guy in the store didn’t know.”
    I did know where that was, and opened my mouth—
    “Speak and I’ll make your dad bleed. You speak to no one.”
    I shut my mouth again. I turned and started trying to walk away, hoping and hoping he wouldn’t follow, but I was so scared my legs wouldn’t work properly. Then a big guy in a Giants shirt turned the corner and started walking toward me, laughing loudly into his phone. It was as if I’d been in a twilight zone thing where the whole world had stilled and turned into an empty film set, and then he’d come and broken the spell.
    Relief shot through me like antifreeze, thawing my limbs, and I hurried off.
    I heard Mr. Suit behind me say, “Hey! What’s the deal?”
    But I didn’t stop; I kept on walking. I didn’t even feel that guilty. I mean, if you’re a man, you have to figure that stopping a teenage girl for directions on an empty street is stupid, right?
    As I kept on walking toward the library, I checked there was no one near me and then said, “Why can’t I speak to people?”
    I could feel the voice considering. “You deserve no human contact. You are poison.”
    I think I actually gasped. Rivets of pain and horror pinned me to the sidewalk, and I stopped still again. You have to understand, when you’ve felt for a long time that you are dangerous to people, that you are a stain, and then someone else says it, it’s a shock.
    “Remember?” said the voice. “Remember what you did?”
    “Shut up,” I said. “Just ******* shut up.”
    The voice laughed. “Nice way to talk,” it said. “Slap yourself.”
    “What?”
    “Hard. On the face. So it stings.”
    “But—”
    “Do it. Now.”
    I did it.
    My mind floated away from my body, a balloon with its string cut. I was in the sky, with the clouds and the seagulls. Cass, Cass, Cass , they called, and I thought of Procne, her soul put into the body of a nightingale to save her from Tereus, and I wished right then that my soul could turn into a seagull, could fly away into the wet sky, full of hanging raindrops, a screen of shimmering water that was in all places at once.
    Then, after I don’t know how long, my breathing started to slow. The world came into focus again, slowly. I started walking. The voice didn’t say anything.
    I passed the baseball cages, where Dad and I used to go sometimes when I was young. Mom would come too, but she’d go for coffee at the diner on the corner. She said she didn’t want to be there to see it if a ball gave me a black eye.
    Now, the place was boarded shut—a lot of stuff was boarded shut. There’d been the financial crash, in 2008. I was young then, but of course I’d seen how the number of tourists went down every year, how the businesses closed one after another, enough that I had spent most of my