He hesitated for a fraction of a second. “My dad got laid off,” he said. “My uncle—that’s Will’s dad—is a cop down here. He hooked him up with a landscaping job. Dad was a teacher before. My stepmom has some family nearby.”

So the woman she’d seen unpacking was his stepmom. Dea waited for him to mention his real mom but he didn’t, so she didn’t press.

He was quiet for a minute and Dea started to panic. She couldn’t think of anything to say. Then he blurted out, “It’s too open here. Too much sky.” Almost immediately, he laughed again. “I guess I’m used to the city.”

She knew exactly what he meant—the sky was like a big mouth, hanging open, ready to swallow you whole. But she just said, “Where’d you move from?”

“Chicago,” he said.

“I lived in Chicago for a while,” she said. “Lincoln Park.”

He turned to look out the window. “That’s where we lived,” he said. Then, “Where to now?”

She got a flush of pleasure. Don’t trust it, a voice, her logical voice, piped up quickly. You know you’ll only be disappointed.

Maybe not, another voice said stubbornly. Maybe he’s got those four nipples after all.

It was so absurd: she was actually hoping that the boy next to her had extra nipples.

“We could go to Cincinnati,” she said. “It’s only two hours.” She was joking, of course. But Connor’s reflection, overlaid across a plain of brown and gray, smiled. “Drive on,” he said.

Dea found it easy—almost too easy—to open up to Connor. In less than an hour, she’d told Connor more than she’d told anyone in years—way more than she’d ever told Gollum. They shared likes and dislikes, words neither of them could stand to hear, like cream and moisture. They’d hopscotched from Dea’s love of old junk to her hatred of bananas to the months she’d spent living next to a military base in Georgia. Her mom had a boyfriend then, the only boyfriend she remembered.

“So it’s just you and your mom, then?” Connor asked. She appreciated that he didn’t just straight-up ask her about her dad. Not that she would have anything to say, except he looks good in a red polo shirt.

She nodded. “What about you?” she said. “No siblings?”

A muscle twitched in Connor’s jaw. “No. Used to, though.” His fingers drummed against the dashboard, the first time he had shown any sign of discomfort. Dea tried to think of something to say, words of comfort or a question about what had happened, but then he was smiling again and the moment, the impression of past pain, was gone. “You really hate bananas?”

Dea felt vaguely disappointed, as if she’d missed an opportunity. “Despise them,” she said.

“Even banana bread?”

“Even worse.” She made a face. “Why ruin bread by putting banana in it? It’s like a banana sneak attack. I like them out in the open, where I can see them.”

He laughed and chucked her chin. “You’re a piece of work, Donahue.” But the way he said it made it sound like a compliment.

Connor plugged in his iPhone and played her some of his favorite songs—stuff by Coldplay and the Smiths, plus a bunch of songs from bands she’d never heard of—but he never stopped talking over the music. He didn’t like the color red (“too obvious”), or raw onions (“it’s texture, not taste”), or highways. “They look the same everywhere,” he said. “Back roads are way more interesting. They have flavor. Except,” he quickly added, “for this beautiful highway, of course.”

He gestured out the window; they were passing an industrial farm. Dea knew only one way of driving to Cincinnati, on IN-46. The view had been the same since they’d left Fielding. The three Fs: farms, flatlands, firearm ranges.

Connor had been a swimmer in Chicago and was “decent—good for state, not good enough to go national.” He hated football and mozzarella cheese (“it’s like weird alien skin”). He believed in ghosts—really believed. Scientifically.

“Are you serious?” Dea couldn’t help but say.

He spread his hands wide. “There are more things on heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” She was impressed that he’d memorized a Shakespeare quote, and didn’t want to tell him she disagreed. There were plenty of things that were dreamed about, more things than you’d believe.

He’d been a vegetarian for four years, which was weird, because he didn’t seem like one. When she asked him about it, he shrugged and said, “I really like dogs.”

“We don’t eat dogs,” she pointed out.

“Exactly,” he said cryptically. “Anyway, I’m not vegetarian anymore. One day I went crazy at a steak buffet. It wasn’t pretty.” He had to rearrange his whole body to turn and look at her. He reminded her of a puppet whose strings aren’t working all together. “What about you?”

“I’m not vegetarian,” she said.

“No.” He laughed. “I meant what about you? Weird quirks? Dark secrets?”

For a split second, she thought of confessing: I walk other people’s dreams. I get sick if I don’t. Mom is afraid of things I don’t understand. That’s why three locks. That’s why no mirrors. She’s probably nuts, and I might be nuts like her.

“I don’t have any,” she said.

Something flickered behind his eyes—an expression gone too soon for her to name. “Everyone has dark secrets,” he said.

They went on a hunt for billboards. The weirder the sign, the better. She got three points for spotting LAVENDER’S: INDIANA’S LARGEST EMPORIUM FOR XXX TOYS, VIDEOS, AND POSTERS. Connor got a point for THE FIREWORKS FACTORY and two points for a faded billboard featuring an enormous Jesus on the cross and the words: MEET JESUS FACE-TO-FACE! In smaller letters: RESULTS NOT GUARANTEED.

They’d crossed over the Ohio border when Connor shouted. Dea nearly drove off the road.

“Pull over, pull over!” he said, so she did, barely making the exit. A big billboard, faded from the weather, was staked into the dirt: OHIO’S LARGEST CORN MAZE. In the distance, she saw it: golden walls of corn, stretching toward the horizon.

“Really?” she said.

He was still gazing at the sign, enraptured. “It’s the largest, Dea. We have to.” He turned to her and put a hand on her thigh just for a second. Her heart went still. But then his hand was gone, and her heart started hammering again, even though she’d walked a dream the night before.

The last time Dea had been in a maze of any kind was in Florida. That one was made of walls; it was part of an amusement park called Funville, which was only thirty miles from Disney World but smaller and older and cheaper, the dollar store equivalent of the amusement park industry. Dea’s mom hated crowds but she loved mazes because they reminded her of dreams: that same twisty kind of logic, the same sense of being suspended in time, moving forward without moving forward at all. She especially loved the maze at Funville, which was all white, made from cheap plastic studded with glitter so it looked kind of like snow, especially if you lived in Florida and didn’t see snow very often. In Dea’s memory, the white walls were the size of skyscrapers.

Dea and Connor climbed out of the car. Dea had been expecting a crowd but there was no one around—no parents and kids rushing in and out of the maze. The ticket booth was padlocked and marked with a sign that said CLOSED. There was just a bleached fence and a gap in the corn where the maze began, and the high white sun staring down impassively.

At least it was cooler inside the maze. The ground was dark with shadows. Connor suggested they race to the center. Dea quickly agreed. She didn’t know if it was the heat or the maze or Connor, but she was feeling a little dizzy, almost drunk, like the time at Christmas in Houston when her mom made eggnog with too much rum and let her have a full cup, and they ended up outside in their bikinis, tanning until the sun went down, and she woke up with a headache and a slick tongue and a bad sunburn.