Release(13)

She asked him, very seriously, “Is there homework?”

“I did mine after breakfast,” he said back, “when Jennifer Pulowski was having that meltdown about her parents’ divorce.”

“Oh, yeah,” Angela said, still stunned. “Me, too.” That’s when she turned back to the front seat and said, her voice breaking, “Momma?”

Adam and Angela had been firm friends ever since. They’d nearly died together, after all, which seemed a solid basis. He kind of loved the Darlingtons. He definitely loved Angela. If you could choose your family, he’d definitely choose them. And maybe he already had. He looked at his phone again and wondered about her as he found Karen and Renee in housewares.

“All I know is,” Karen said, scanning the label for some non-stick frying pans, “my dad said that if I ever got near a meth lab, he’d send me to live with my grandmother in Alaska. Alaska. There are supposed to be twenty-three of these.”

“Please,” Renee said, nodding at Adam as she saw him approaching. “Like black people ever do meth. Six, twelve, eighteen, there’s twenty-two.”

“The black people in Alaska probably do,” Karen said, typing in the stock loss. “The ones who aren’t my grandmother.”

“Both of them?” Renee said. “Hey, Adam. Why is this a three-person job?”

“I shelve and unshelve,” he said. “Wade wants housewares and guns done by this afternoon.”

“Wade wants to look at your ass in that uniform, is what he wants,” Karen said, scanning a slightly larger non-stick frying pan. “This says we’re supposed to have 27.2. How can you have point two of a frying pan?”

“How can you scan point two of a frying pan?” Renee said.

Adam took the scanning wand, whacked it hard with his hand, and handed it back. Karen scanned again. “Twenty-seven.” She looked up, deadpan. “Thank you for whacking my wand, Adam.”

“Any time.” He started unshelving the next section of housewares, which was every variety of saucepan.

Karen and Renee were cousins, in Adam’s year at school, inseparable convention-going geeks, and worked every shift together. One time they came in pre-con cosplay as two-fifths of a black Jem and the Holograms under their uniforms. Wade didn’t even notice.

“You guys talking about the murder?” Adam asked.

“Yeah,” Karen said, the smaller of the two. “Renee knew Katherine van Leuwen in Girl Scouts.”

“A million years ago, when she was still Katie,” Renee said, taller but quieter around anyone else besides Karen. She had the beginnings of insulin injection scars on her torso. She’d shown him once. “She was nice. Kinda lost, though. Even then.”

“Little girls aren’t naturally lost,” Karen said, frowning as she scanned saucepans. “Someone makes them that way.”

“You sound like Angela,” Adam said, reshelving frying pans.

“More people should sound like Angela.”

“I don’t disagree.”

“I get nightmares about being strangled,” Renee said. “You know I can’t even wear scarves.”

“She really can’t,” Karen said. “Fire would be worse, though. Fire would be way worse.”

“Fire’s faster. You know for a long time you can’t breathe before you get strangled.”

They worked in silence for a minute while they all considered this. Adam reshelved the counted saucepans and unshelved the uncounted bundles of cutlery, which weighed a ton.

“Do black people really not do meth?” he asked.

“Nope,” Karen said. “That’s just stupid crackers out in the woods.”





She stands in the backyard of a cabin. It’s quiet, closed in by trees on three sides, a gravel drive and a second cabin on the fourth. The cabins are long unused; the grass reaches her knees.

But there is yellow police tape around this one.

She starts a slow walk, pressing down the grass until she comes across newer tracks near the front, left by many feet, into and out of the small front door.

“I know this place,” she says, to no one, to the faun, who she cannot see but who watches from the edge of the trees.

This is the lake cabin, she thinks, one of the cheap ones, across a forlorn road and away from the lake shore. One that used to be serviced by the convenience store she’s just come from. One that was closed around the same time the convenience store was.

But one that was still used, illegally.

“How do I know these things?” she says, frowning to herself.



The faun wishes to tell her, tell her that she is caught, his Queen, snagged and bound by a frightened soul. He needs to tell her that she is in danger of becoming lost forever, but he cannot. He can only look at the sun, less than an hour from its midday peak. The faun is worried. The faun is very worried.





She crosses the grass to the front of the cabin. Hesitating only for a second, she steps up, onto the porch, pulling aside the yellow tape. The front door is open, and she pauses there.

She can smell violence. Terrible things have happened here. Not once, but many times, over many years. The despair of humans. Their fear. The violence they do themselves.

“The violence we do ourselves,” she whispers.