Lee looks up. It's Parci. "Just some book. You know."

"Is it good?" Parci says.

"I don't know. It's a love story. Kind of."

"Then I wouldn't like it," Parci says. "I like stories about animals. Do you have a boyfriend? Because Czigany isn't allowed to date. Neither am I."

"Your parents are kind of strict," Lee says. "There's this boy I run into sometimes when I buy comic books. He asked me out to the movies once, but it was a horror movie. I don't like horror movies."

Parci says, "Nobody found any arrowheads. Just a dead vole. So is this Czigany's Ordeal?"

Czigany and the others are back up in the barn. Probably Dodo is showing them how to make cheese. Or pipe bombs. Lee can hear them shouting and laughing.

"This is the part of the Ordeal that I'm in charge of," Lee says, evading Parci's question as gracefully as she can.

"I thought it would be something really embarrassing. Or dangerous. Or disgusting. Not that this isn't kind of awesome." But Parci sounds almost disappointed. "Everybody in my grade talks all the time about the Ordeal. How scared they are. But you can tell they're really into it."

"It's just this tradition," Lee says. "Girls' schools have all kinds of weird traditions. Normally you have your Ordeal when you're a freshman-you know, a rite of passage or something. But we think Czigany is great, and so a couple of weeks ago we asked her if she wanted one because otherwise you don't really fit in. You'll see. When your class goes through their Ordeals."

"We won't be here," Parci says. "We have to move a lot."

DARLINGSEA: hey, cabell, dancys baby is really ugly. no kidding. first i thought all kids must be that ugly when theyre born, but my mom said lucinda larkin cleary is in her own special category TRUEBALOO: ha ha DARLINGSEA: u really need to come see her quick. shes got hair all over her body & she also had teeth TRUEBALOO: r u @ the hospital? tried to call but dancys phone is off DARLINGSEA: when she was born! & a big caul that your mom went & buried somewhere in the yard. last year in biology we read that when a fetus grows inside the mother its like it goes through different species on its way to being human DARLINGSEA: yeah im here in the waiting room DARLINGSEA: so maybe baby lucinda got stuck somewhere around the wolverine stage. just kidding! do you remember dancys wedding when i got completely wasted? how i asked if i looked like a mermaid because of my dress which is why i bought it in the first place DARLINGSEA: because it looked like something a mermaid would wear. but what i was wondering is do you think there really are mermaids? or vampires?

TRUEBALOO: how is dancy? tell her im psyched to be an uncle DARLINGSEA: shes great shes on lots of drugs. i brought her this book DARLINGSEA: about a girl who falls in love with a vampire. it was kind of bad except i also kind of enjoyed it DARLINGSEA: anyway dont know if dancy told u, but im going out with a guy. hes got a widows peek just like a vampire might have TRUEBALOO: good for you, c DARLINGSEA: dancy says u have a serious girlfriend. so i didnt want u to think i still had some weird crush DARLINGSEA: on u TRUEBALOO: youre a sweet kid DARLINGSEA: bcause i did have a crush on u when i was 12 & u saved me from drowning TRUEBALOO: tell her i can't wait to see the new kid. next time u need your life saved u know where to find me ok?

Lee dog-ears the page and checks her cell phone. Time to get going. Time for part two of Czigany's Ordeal. But she doesn't move.

There are birds' nests tufted with goat hair and candy-bar wrappers discarded by broken-hearted archeologists, or relics, perhaps, of Lee's childhood, high in the spokes of the Ferris wheel. Trees crowd the pasture, guarding Peaceable Kingdom or else threatening it, Lee is never sure which. The air is scented with sweet meadow grass and the Christmas smell of the stands of pine. If only the Ferris wheel would turn again, down would come the birds' nests and up would go Lee, to be the queen of all she surveys: goats, pine trees, barn, pink house, arrowheads, Maureen on her way to the outhouse to pee one last time, Bad and Nikki escorting Parci and Czigany back to the van.

As if she really were queen, an official delegation-Aunt Dodo and the goats-is headed in Lee's direction. "Nice of you to come see me," Dodo hollers.

"Sorry," Lee says. "It's just that I wanted to get to the end of this story. And this is my favorite reading spot in the world. Sometimes I think the only time I'm ever completely happy is when I'm here. Or am I being melodramatic?"

"It's the only place I've ever been happy," Dodo says. "So remind me again. You'll be back in an hour or so?"

"Is that still okay?" Lee says.

"Just keep an eye on your friends. Caught Bad trying to sneak up on my Tennessee girls and make them faint. What kind of name is that anyway?"

"Her real name is Patricia. And I used to do that, too," Lee reminds her.

"When you were eight. Glad you're not eight anymore. You were a real punk." Dodo says this without a drop of fondness.

"So what am I now?" Lee says, teasing.

Dodo sighs. Gives Lee a hard look. "A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else. You sure you really want to do this to your friend? It's cruel, Lee. She'll be frightened. Parci, too."

"Parci made us bring her along," Lee says. "Parci's tough. We won't leave them alone for more than a few hours. All they have to do is stay put. And Nikki is going to go up the tree before they get there. So if they get loose and wander off, she can deal with it."

"Something bad happens to Czigany and Parci and it's back to prison for me," Dodo says. "Or if Nikki falls out of the tree. You ever think about that?"

"You think we shouldn't do it?"

Bad is gesturing for Lee to come on. Aunt Dodo is frowning down at her. "I'm not sure I'm the one to ask," she says finally. "I've made some terrible mistakes. Not the bank. I don't regret blowing up the bank. But I did some dumb things before that and goddess knows I did some dumb things afterwards, too. So now everything seems like it might be a mistake, which is why I don't leave Peaceable Kingdom very often. It's a long way back down the mountain if something goes wrong, Lee."

"Hey, Lee!" Bad yells. "Let's get this show on the road!"

"It'll be fine," Lee tells Dodo. "Bad and Maureen will kill me if I mess up the next part. That's the only thing I'm worried about."

"So don't," Dodo says, and gives Lee a hug. The goats all look surprised. Dodo isn't a hugger.

Bad has plugged in her iPod and is playing some yodelly crap. Czigany and Parci are blindfolded and Nikki has handcuffed the sisters wrist to wrist.

"We're going home now, right?" Czigany says.

"Home?" Nikki says. "What, no Ordeal?"

Czigany says, "Having to use an outhouse wasn't Ordeal enough?"

Parci says, "I think we need to go home. My ear is kind of achy?"

"Don't worry," Bad says. "We just have one stop first. Then home."

Clementine was seventeen when Cabell came home. He'd been kicked out of graduate school for breaking into a research lab in Durham and liberating the test animals. Dogs, monkeys, rats, and cats. Clementine watched it all on Fox, with her mother and Lucinda Larkin. "See that man?" Clementine said to Lucinda Larkin. "That's your uncle! He's sleeping in your basement!" The news anchor informed them that when security caught up with Cabell on the lawn of the research building, he'd had an octopus with him, sloshing around in a two-gallon bucket.

Lucinda Larkin didn't seem particularly impressed. She went on playing with Clementine's hair. Clementine's mother said, "Dancy looked fit to kill when she dropped Lucinda Larkin off. Said something about John's computer. Some e-mail account she's come across."

Clementine's mother and Dancy had become quite close despite the difference in their ages. Their favorite topics of conversation were their respective marriages, Clementine, and, of course, John Cleary.

"Lucky Cabell," Clementine said. "Hope he remembered his earplugs. And lucky me!" She squeezed Lucinda Larkin. "I get a slumber party with my favorite little girl."

When she drove Lucinda Larkin over the next afternoon to pick up a change of clothes, Dancy wasn't home. Cabell was napping on the couch in the basement.

"So what were you going to do with that octopus?" Clementine said.

"The octopus?" Cabell said. He had on a pair of old flannel pajamas and there was a duffel bag beside the couch. His hair had gotten long again. "I don't know. Elope with it, run off to the Gulf of Mexico?"

"You remember me, right?" Clementine said.

"How could I forget?" Cabell said. "What time is it?"

"Two," Clementine said. "Where's Dancy?"

"Uh, I think she said something about yoga," Cabell said. "She and John were up pretty late last night. You know, talking?"

"Those two sure like to talk," Clementine said.

Cabell smiled in the direction of Clementine's knee, where Lucinda Larkin was lurking. "I don't think she likes me."

"Dancy is raising her to hate all men," Clementine said. "To be their doom. Isn't that right, Lucinda Larkin?"

"Daddy's a bad man," Lucinda Larkin said.

Cabell said, "That's the first thing I've heard her say since I got here."

Clementine sat down on the floor opposite Cabell and pulled Lucinda Larkin into her lap. Lucinda Larkin held on hard, like any minute the airlock doors would open and she'd be sucked away into the blackness of the void. Clementine knew exactly how she felt. "Are they really making you sleep on that thing?"

Cabell pulled a T-shirt out of the duffel bag. "Yes. Why?"

"Because that couch used to belong to Uncle John's fraternity," Clementine said. "He bought it off them when he graduated because he'd gotten lucky on it so many times. Dancy tried to set it on fire last New Year's. Because it doesn't go with her decor, but Uncle John won't let her get rid of it."

Cabell said, "After all the, um, talk last night, I was afraid your uncle was going to come down and ask if there was room on the couch."

Clementine put her hands over Lucinda Larkin's ears. "Dancy's been sleeping on your niece's top bunk for at least a week. So you should be safe. Speaking of true love, are you still going out with that girl? The one Dancy told me about at Christmas? Because I have a boyfriend now, but it isn't serious. Not really. Lucinda Larkin, let go of my arm. You are going to leave bruises. Want a Coke, Cabell? If you don't want a Coke, I know where Dancy hides all the booze. So how are things, anyway?"

"I'll take a Coke," Cabell said. "And how things are, more or less, is I just got kicked out of a graduate-school program that I still owe at least eight thousand dollars' tuition on. I'm stuck living in the basement of my kid sister's house for the foreseeable future because my mother's yard is full of reporters. I can't even go down to the beach with my surfboard without running into a million people who've known me my whole life, who know all about my life, who want to tell me what I should do with my life. I'm pretty sure getting it on with some high-school kid isn't going to turn things around for me at this stage, if that's what you were so delicately offering. All I need is your mother chasing after me with a bread knife."

"My mother warned you off?" Clementine said.

"Yeah," Cabell said. "Not directly. She talked to Dancy and then Dancy sat down and had a talk with me. Like Dancy ought to be giving anyone advice. Not that I was planning to take advantage of what is obviously some unfortunate quirk of your otherwise undoubtedly mature and capable personality. Your mother says you have straight As and a chance at a four-year scholarship at Queens."

"Don't worry," Clementine said. "I'm not still hung up on you or anything. I just owe you. For, you know, saving my life. Twice. And I need a good excuse to break up with my boyfriend. Want to play Resident Evil on Uncle John's Wii? Or would you rather help me help Dancy figure out if Uncle John is cheating on her? There's this Web site she wants to check out."

"I hate zombies," Cabell said. "Hey, Lucinda Larkin, let's go spy on your daddy."

"Those pajamas belong to Momma," Lucinda Larkin said to Clementine as they went up the stairs. "He had to borrow them because he doesn't have any pajamas and all of Daddy's were dirty."

Clementine said, "I had a pair of pajamas like that once. I went swimming in them and your Uncle Cabell had to fish me out. Otherwise I would have drowned. That was when I was a little girl just like you."

"Cut it out, Clementine," Cabell said. "I mean it." But he sounded friendly. As if they were friends, teasing each other.

"You were just a kid, too," Clementine said. It was weird to think about. "I'm older now than you were then." They'd both been so young then. She went and got two of Dancy's wine coolers out of the fridge and a sippy cup with chocolate milk. Lucinda Larkin followed Cabell into her parents' bedroom, turned on the television, and popped Beauty and the Beast into the DVD player.

"Need a password," Cabell said. He had Uncle John's laptop out already.

"Dancy says it's zero-L-D-S-K-zero-zero-one underscore sixty-nine."

"Got it. What are we looking for?"

"I have this address she saved. It was in his history. She put it in Favorites. Okay. Here's the Web site. Sexy Russians. Sexy surfer girls. Sexy man-girls. That would be the best. You think he's into man-girls? Mail-order brides?"

"All of the above, no doubt," Cabell said. He took the laptop back. "Just a minute. Let me open up another window. Want to check my e-mail. Okay." He clicked back to the sexy Russian Web site. "If Dancy and your uncle get divorced, you think she'll get the house?"

"Cabell, she'll get everything she wants. Including the couch. You want to make her real happy? Let's go look on Craigslist to see if we can find her a new couch."

The next hour was the best hour of Clementine's life. Two months earlier she'd persuaded tenor David Ledbetter that it would be really, really special if they broke into the elementary school in the middle of the night. One thing had led to another and they'd lost their virginity together in the first-grade reading hut, and even though the whole thing had been kind of a catastrophe, ever since then David Ledbetter seemed to have this idea that in order to keep Clementine happy he had to come up with new and better locations. It was making Clementine crazy.

She and Cabell didn't even kiss. Nobody saved anybody's life, and Lucinda Larkin began to scream halfway through Beauty and the Beast because Clementine hadn't remembered to fast-forward through the scene where the singing candlestick did something scary that Lucinda Larkin had never been able to explain. They had to make her promise not to tell Dancy.

Clementine's choir group left for Hawaii a week later. Everyone said Cabell was going to get a job as a lifeguard and stick around at least through the end of the summer. Clementine sent a postcard to Lucinda Larkin. She sent one to Cabell, too. She went swimming. David Ledbetter gave her a lei. (No jokes, please.) When she came home a week later, Dancy had kicked Uncle John out of the house. Cabell had left the country. Her mother related all of this to her in the car on the way home from the airport.

Clementine said, "Cabell did what?"

"Nobody really knows," my mother said. "He's in Romania. Apparently he got offered some job with a conservation group tracking wolf populations."

"I thought he had a court date!" Clementine said. "Didn't he have to post bail or something? Can you just do that, just leave the country like that when you're wanted for stealing an octopus?"

"Why are you so all het up?" her mother said, cutting a look at her.

Clementine said nothing.

"Clementine," her mother said. "Someday you'll find someone who will make you happy. For a while. If you're lucky. But for the sake of my blood pressure, would you please stop mooning and making yourself miserable over a boy who can't even manage to take some dogs out for a walk without getting himself on Fox News!"

Clementine waited to see if she was finished. She wasn't. "Just look at your face! You look like someone ran over your daddy. You have been nothing but trouble since the day you were born. Don't give me that look! I swear if you decide to swallow a bottle of aspirin or run away to Atlanta or get knocked up by that peaky-faced tenor just to make some damn point, I will make your life a living hell."

"I can do what I want to!" Clementine said.

"Not in my house, you can't," her mother said. "And not in anybody else's house, either, not unless you want me to come after you with a two-by-four. You are going to finish your senior year, graduate with honors, and go off to Duke or Chapel Hill or Queens College or, God forbid, UNC-Wilmington, and have a good life. Are we clear on that?"

Clementine said nothing.

"I said, are we clear?"

"Yes, ma'am," Clementine said.

Nobody heard anything from Cabell. Clementine broke up with David Ledbetter. She and Madeline and Grace, friends again, all went to prom stag. Everyone had boy trouble.

The Saturday before graduation, Clementine went over to help Dancy throw all of John Cleary's trash out. He was living down in Myrtle Beach with some girl who had three piercings in her lip and one bad-tempered pit bull. Dancy wouldn't let Lucinda Larkin sleep over there, which meant Clementine was babysitting almost every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday night while Dancy waitressed at the Bad Oyster.

"I don't know what I'm going to do when you go off to Queens," Dancy said. "Lucinda Larkin is going to miss you so much! Aren't you, baby?"

"No," Lucinda Larkin said.

Clementine gave Lucinda Larkin a squeeze. "I'll come home every weekend," she said. "You know, to do laundry."

Dancy dumped out a box. "College essays," she said. "John used to brag about how he didn't write any of these. Just got his girlfriends to write them for him. It's like serial killers, how they keep souvenirs."

"At least you didn't meet him until later," Clementine said. "You didn't have to write about the theme of loneliness in the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. Or compare and contrast Helen of Troy with Hester Prynne."

"Like giving birth to Lucinda Larkin was so much easier," Dancy said. She held up a photograph of John Cleary and some girl. Another photograph of John Cleary and another girl. "You know what I wish? I wish I'd never met him."

Clementine said, "Sorry about that."

"Yeah, well, I'm sorry about my brother. That he ran off to Romania to count wolves. I kind of thought maybe one day you and he-"

Clementine waited. When Dancy didn't say anything else, she said, "You thought maybe one day what?"

Dancy said, "That he might ask you out. When you were out of high school. He said you were a funny kid. You made him laugh. That would have been nice, don't you think, if one day you and I had ended up being sisters-in-law?"