Before I could stumble through an excuse, the desk phone rang. I held up a finger and went to answer. Static filled the line, followed by an ear-piercing squeal. I yanked it away from my ear, wincing, then drew it back as the screech ended. “Splendor Community YMC—”

“Fran!” someone hissed on the other end.

“Remy?” I glanced toward my cell phone on the desk. “Why are you calling me at work?”

“I don’t have your number memorized, and this one’s online,” he said. “Look, I’m on my dad’s phone, and I only have a second before he realizes he forgot it and circles back. He’s coming to ask you and Arthur questions. You can’t tell him anything, okay?”

“About the field?” I said, startled. I thought about St. James, about his gun. “He can’t honestly think we had anything—”

“He doesn’t,” Remy cut me off. “But he can’t know you were there. I mean it, Franny. He cannot know. I’ll explain tonight. Can you meet me at the tracks, midnight?”

It took me several seconds to understand. Despite his Rebel Without a Cause aesthetic, Remy mostly honored his dad’s rules, at least when he was already in trouble.

“I have to go,” Remy hissed. “Midnight, Fran. Don’t tell anyone, okay? I’m serious. Not even Arthur. Not until we talk. And no matter what: You weren’t in that field. You were at Levi’s, watching The Shining, and then we fell asleep.”

The line clicked dead, and I stared at the phone, trying to make sense of it all.

“What did Remy want?” Sofía said behind me.

I put the phone down. “Sheriff Nakamura is coming to ask us some questions.” I swallowed the knot in my throat. “Remy wants us to lie.”

“Like under oath?” Sofía said.

“If it comes to it,” I said, “I think so.”

Her eyebrow arched, and she studied me with something like suspicion. Or maybe I was imagining it. “And that’s all he said?”

There were all kinds of things my friends and I never talked about, dozens of unspoken secrets, not to mention Nick’s storytelling. This felt different.

“Pretty much,” I said.

Sofía’s lips pursed. “Okay,” she said finally, and walked away.

Lightning flashed outside the window, and something feathery and black smashed into the door. I flinched and swallowed a scream as I jumped up from behind the desk.

The bird slid down the glass door and dropped lifelessly to the concrete, a thin trail of blood connecting the point where it hit to where it lay dead.

I jumped again as two more hit in quick succession, behind it. I clamped my hand over my chest like my heart was a skittish Chihuahua I could soothe by petting, but it didn’t slow and my stomach didn’t unknot.

I kept thinking about the mind-bending CRACK! and the burst of light that had followed, the way I’d felt like the universe had split down the middle and everything was falling toward the rift, upending the laws of physics and swallowing them whole. In the last second I remembered, I’d lost all concept of up and down, of balance, of my body and its place in space.

I felt fine now, I told myself. Completely, totally normal.

But if the birds had been affected this way, what were the odds that we’d been unscathed?

In my head, Cheryl Kelly’s breathy voice sang, The plot thickens!

SEVEN

AT LEAST THE SHERIFF had come alone.

I would only be lying to one cop, whom I knew, instead of multiple strangers.

The worst part was that Dad happened to be home between jobs, and there wasn’t anywhere for four people to comfortably sit in our house.

We had one couch and an off-brand La-Z-Boy in the living room, and the two tiny chairs in our tiny kitchen at the back of the house were covered in mail piles, discarded jackets and bags, leaning stacks of thrift-store National Geographics whose photos I’d pined over while standing at the kitchen sink eating breakfast. The surface of the table itself was worse: playing cards and mugs that never made it to the dishwasher, paper towels and junk mail and crumbs that never made it to the trash.

I could tell Dad was embarrassed. Possibly because we never had adults over and he’d just realized how badly we needed to clean. Possibly because he had to sit on the couch between me and Arthur while Sheriff Nakamura perched on the not-La-Z-Boy, looking stern and paternal despite the purple plastic cup of water Dad had offered him, with Droog sitting squarely on his feet.

“I am sorry to just drop in on you folks like this.” The sheriff eyed me guiltily. I was dripping wet from the ride home, leaving a full-body print on the couch. I pulled my hands inside my damp sweatshirt pockets to hide the scars.

“No trouble at all.” Dad cast an anxious glance between me and Arthur. “I’m just afraid I don’t understand what it’s all about. You said there was a fire on Jenkins Lane?” His grimace swiveled between Arthur and me, clearly readying himself for the worst.

The sheriff scooted to the edge of the formidable chair and gave an encouraging smile. “Something like that. You haven’t seen it on the news?”

Dad scratched his jaw. “I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of time to keep up with that sort of thing these days.”

A lie. Sure, Dad was busy, but he was also an insomniac. If you stood in the hallway at just about any given hour of the night, you could hear the soft din of prerecorded baseball games coming from the television in his bedroom. Never sitcoms or action movies or traffic and weather reports. Just baseball games that had already happened. His happy place.