As usual, her mom had locked all three locks on the front door, and as usual, Dea had a bitch of a time getting the keys to work. In Cleveland, in Chicago, even in Florida, Dea could understand her mom’s obsession with locks and barriers, escape plans and worst-case-scenario talks. But here, in Fielding, where the biggest crime was cattle tipping, it made less sense.

Then again, her mom had never made any sense. Dea occasionally imagined that scientists would come knocking on the door and drag them both to a lab for experimentation. They’d isolate the gene for crazy—an inherited twist in the double helix, an unexpected sickle shape.

The hall was cool and dark, and smelled like rosemary. Other than the tick-tick-tick of a dozen old clocks, it was quiet. Dea’s mom was a nut about clocks. They were the only things she insisted on keeping, the only possessions she bothered to take with them when they moved. Sometimes Dea felt like that crocodile in Peter Pan, like a ticking clock was lodged in her belly and she couldn’t escape it. Every so often, her heart picked up on the rhythm.

Dea didn’t bother calling out for her mom. She was usually gone during the day, although Dea was no longer sure what, exactly, she did. There’d been so many jobs triumphantly attained, then quietly lost. A quick celebration—I’m a receptionist now!—a rare glass of champagne, a spin through the local mall to buy shoes and clothes that looked the part. Sometimes Dea thought that’s why her mom got jobs in the first place: so she could dress up, pretend to be someone else.

Inevitably, after a week or two, the sensible, flat-soled shoes were returned to the closet; the car would remain in the driveway well past nine a.m.; and Dea would find a laminated ID card bearing a picture of her mom’s smiling face under the words Sun Security Systems or Thompson & Ives, Attorneys-at-Law discarded in the trash, under a thin film of rotting lettuce. Then the weeks of scrimping began: microwavable meals purchased from the gas station, sudden relocations to avoid overdue rent, pit stops in cheap motels mostly populated by drug addicts. Dea was never sure what her mom did to get fired. She suspected that her mom simply got bored and stopped showing up.

In the kitchen, Dea excavated some pickles from the back of the fridge, behind a bottle of crusty ketchup and a chunk of moldy cheddar cheese, and took the jar out to the back porch, her favorite part of the house. She loved its broad, white railing set on a curve, like the swollen prow of a ship, its sagging rattan furniture, and beat-up iron tables. She settled down on the porch swing, relishing in the Friday feeling: two whole days without school. She liked to think of the weekend as a geometric shape, as a long wave. Now, she was just riding up toward the first swell, at the very farthest point from the dumpy shoreline of school.

Sometimes, when she was sitting on the porch, she liked to imagine another Odea, an alternate-girl who lived on an alternate-farm, maybe back in time when it really was a farm. She imagined her sitting on the porch swing, using one leg for momentum, as Odea did. She enjoyed imagining all the different people and lives that had been played out in the same space, all of them packed together and on top of each other like Styrofoam peanuts in a carton, and at the same time preserved in their separate realities.

She wondered whether alternate-Odea liked pickles, too.

She was startled by a sudden rush of wings. A black bird landed on the railing, hopped a few inches, and cocked its head to look at her. It had a big red splash across its belly, as though it had recently been plucked out of a paint can.

“Hey.” Odea wrestled a pickle out of the jar. She had no idea whether birds liked pickles but decided to give it a shot. “Want one?”

The bird hopped away another few inches. Its eyes were like two dark stones.

She liked birds. Birds were harbingers—another word she’d learned from her mom. The dictionary defined harbinger as a person who goes ahead and makes known the approach of another; herald. Also an omen; anything that foreshadows a future event.

In dreams, birds were very important. Dea often depended on them to show her the way back out of the dreams she walked. Dreams were confusing and ever changing; sometimes she turned and found the passage she had come through blocked by a new wall or a sudden change in the landscape. But birds knew the way out. She just had to follow them.

“Hungry?” she tried again, leaning forward, reaching a little closer.

Suddenly, a dark blur of fur rocketed past her. The bird startled, let out a scream, and went flapping into the air just as Toby made a clumsy lunge for it. Toby thudded down the stairs, belly thumping, and plunged into the garden, as if hoping that the bird might change its mind and fly directly into his mouth.

“Toby!” She stood up quickly but Toby had already disappeared into the garden. She followed him, swatting aside heavy branches dripping with flowers, clusters of chrysanthemums, fat bunches of zinnias that crowded the walkway. Her mother’s garden always reminded her of dreams: the colors slightly too vivid to be real, the perfume so strong it was like a lullaby, whispering for her to sleep, sleep.

She spotted Toby slinking under the low, rotted picket fence that divided her property from the road. It had been too long since she’d walked a dream—a week, maybe longer—and she was getting weak. She was sweating already, and her heart was beating painfully in her chest, even though she wasn’t moving very fast.

Toby took off again as soon as she was close enough to grab him, and it took another ten minutes before Dea could corner him at the edge of Burnett Pond, which was technically the border of Gollum’s family’s property, although Gollum always said her family used only a quarter of their land.

“Got you, asshole,” she said, and snatched Toby up. He was heavy, like a fat, warm rug. “Good thing you’re cute,” she said. “Otherwise I’d chuck you in the pond.” He licked her chin.

She stood for a moment, trying to catch her breath, careful not to stand too close to the water. They were sheltered from the sun by a heavy growth of pine and sycamore trees, a rare break from the wide fields, burnt and withered, stretching all the way from horizon to horizon. The pond was covered with deep purple and green shadows.

She was about to turn back when she noticed a pair of red shorts—a guy’s—and some flip-flops carefully laid out on the bank. She scanned the water and saw a ripple at the far side of the pond, and a dark shape she had originally mistaken for an animal. An arm pinwheeled out of the water. Then another.

She was temporarily mesmerized, as she always was when she saw someone swimming. Slowly, the boy carved his way through the water, creating a small wake. Then, abruptly, before she could turn away, he surfaced.

He had a nice face—good-looking without being too good-looking. The water had turned his hair into spikes, and his nose was crooked, like maybe it had been broken. His chin was pronounced, probably a tiny bit big, and it gave his whole face a stubborn expression.

“This is awkward,” was the first thing he said.

“Sorry,” she said quickly, realizing she probably looked like a weird stalker or a pervert. “My cat . . . I wasn’t watching you.”

“No, no.” He made a face. “I meant . . . well, my clothes.”

Then it hit her: he was swimming naked. He was naked, right then. Which meant she was having a conversation with a naked boy.

“I was just leaving,” she said.

“Wait! Just wait one minute. Just . . . turn around and close your eyes, okay?”

She heard sloshy water sounds, and then the rustle of fabric. She tried to think of something other than the fact that a boy was pulling on clothes less than three feet away from her: a large hall of statues, cool, full of echoes. An image she had seen once in a dream.