“I love that there’s this hole between these two cushions and it’s the perfect place to put my Barbies when they’ve been captured by the evil sea witch because it looks just like a whirlpool. And then the evil sea witch turns them all evil, too, because she gets inside their heads and they can’t think their own thoughts anymore, they can only follow her evil commands.”

I looked silently at Alex as she slid her arm in and out of the gap between couch cushions. I used to play make-believe games like that when I was her age, with the same hole on this same couch.

“You shouldn’t play that game, Alex,” I said finally.

“What? Underwater Capture?” she asked.

“Yeah. Other kids don’t play games like that.”

“Yes, they do,” she said, and even her eyes reminded me of myself, gray-blue and too big for her face.

“They don’t. They play games with other kids. Like School. Or House. Or soccer.”

“I hate soccer,” Alex said.

“I know. I hate soccer, too. But you should play it anyway.”

“Elise?” Neil had lain down on the couch and was resting his head on my lap. It was past his school-night bedtime, but my mom and Steve have never been ones to interrupt a sit-in. “Elise, it’s your turn to say a thing you love about the couch.”

“I love…” I absentmindedly rubbed my hand across the ragged, stained fabric. I supported young activists, but Mom was right; this couch was a piece of shit. “I love that this couch has never judged me.”

“Yeah,” Neil agreed sleepily.

“Yeah,” said Alex. “Good couches don’t do that.”

I sat there and did my American Lit reading until both of them fell asleep. Then Mom and Steve came in and picked them up to carry them upstairs to their bedrooms.

“You realize this is a sit-in, right?” I asked. “That means you two are scabs.”

“It was a sit-in,” Mom said, wrapping her arms around Neil. “Now it’s just a sleep-in.” She kissed me on the top of my head. “Good night, Elise. Don’t stay up too late.”

I waited for a while after the rest of my family went upstairs. Then, once all was silent and dark, I put on my sneakers and I snuck out of the house.

This is something that I started to do after I cut myself. Not right away; for the first few months, my parents were so freaked out that they basically kept me under house arrest. But half a year later, we were back to normal. It’s not like they forgot that their daughter had torn up her wrist with an X-Acto knife. I don’t think you can forget something like that. I just don’t think you can think about it every day without driving yourself crazy.

So in March, as spring was starting to peek through the cold, I began to walk at night. I’d wait until midnight or so, once everyone in the house was asleep, and then I’d put on my shoes, grab my iPod, and head out into the night.

It’s surprisingly easy to sneak out of my house. It’s an old building, built by some rich merchant family in the 1800s, so it doesn’t have a normal house layout. Mom and Steve’s bedroom is on the third floor, Neil’s and Alex’s are on the second, and I alone live on the first floor, in what had once been the maid’s quarters. If I were a different sort of person, I could have taken advantage of this situation to sneak out to something cool. Like keg parties. (I assumed some kids in my town had keg parties, though maybe I only got that idea from movies.) But, since I was just me, I just snuck out to walk alone.

I never knew how many miles I traveled. Something about that first day, when I walked five miles home from school, made me realize: five miles is nothing. So now I wandered around town, sometimes just for half an hour, sometimes until the sun was starting to rise, however long it took for me to get tired. No one saw me and no one knew, and for this reason, these nighttime walks were the only times that I didn’t feel trapped in my life.

Walking at night is like walking in a dream. It’s dark, so I don’t notice much of the scenery. I don’t wear my watch, so time becomes meaningless. I’m not carrying a tote bag or a backpack or whatever usually weighs me down in the daytime, so I feel light and bouncy. I listen to music as loud as I can, and I don’t think about anything.

I know some people would get scared walking alone when it’s so late, but I am not one of those people. I just don’t see anything to be scared of. For one thing, Forbes has declared Glendale to be America’s number-one safest city every year since I was a kid. (Except for one year, when there was a small rash of car break-ins. Glendale dropped to America’s number-two safest city, and there was a lot of outcry about how we needed to “reclaim our crown.”)

For another thing, I’ve never been scared of the dark or silence. When I was younger, my dad and I used to walk around his neighborhood together before I went to bed. He said he liked looking at the stars because it cleared his head. It clears mine, too.

Tonight I walked vaguely in the direction of my school, out of the residential area with its parks and big single-family houses, and into the bordering neighborhood, where mostly college students lived and hung out. I passed by their blocky four-story apartment buildings, then headed down the hill, bypassing shuttered coffee shops, boutiques, and restaurants. A few cars drove by. I saw a woman letting herself into an apartment, and a couple strolling along, pausing occasionally to peer in darkened shop windows. Nobody my age, of course.

At the end of the hill, I turned left onto a wider, grayer street that mostly housed warehouses and storage units. This was the route my school bus took in the mornings. There were no trees in sight, only a few spread-out streetlights, and two girls across the street. Standing still. Watching me.

My heart immediately started beating faster, and I snuck my hand inside my jacket pocket to click off my iPod so I could hear what was going on. In my experience, when people noticed me, it never led to anything good.

“Hey, you!” one of them shouted across the road.

Just keep walking, I told myself. It’s like when Lizzie Reardon calls your name in the hallway. Just keep walking. Think invisible, and if you’re lucky maybe you will become invisible.

“Girl over there!” she yelled again. “You’re going in the wrong direction!”

I stopped when she said that. For some reason, this statement really threw me. I wasn’t going anywhere, so how could I be going in the wrong direction?

“Come here!” she called.

I obey direct orders. That’s why I cleaned up a full lunchroom table, that’s why I gave Jordan my iPod, and that’s why I crossed the street now. Because someone told me to.

The two girls were leaning against a graffitied wall. The one who had shouted was a little taller than me, heavyset, and smoking a cigarette. She wore a black-and-white polka-dot dress with a bright yellow cardigan, and she had feathers in her hair.

“Start’s in there,” she said, cocking her finger at the building behind her.

This was like I’m sending Wrappers to the Gallos all over again. Start’s in there. Why did people always have to speak in code?

“Okay,” I said.

“Have you been here before?” she asked me.

I shrugged in a way that probably meant yes, but could have meant no.

“We haven’t been here since it was over in Pawtucket,” the polka-dot-dress girl went on, gesturing west with her cigarette, even though Pawtucket was roughly nine miles north of where we stood now. Also, how could they not have been somewhere since it was somewhere else? This whole thing was very Alice in Wonderland.

“Do you want a cigarette?” she offered me.

“No, thank you,” I said, then added, “I don’t smoke.”

She nodded. “That’s good. These can kill you.” She took a long drag on her cigarette, as if to prove the point.

Her friend spoke up for the first time. She was petite and had a blond pixie haircut. She reminded me a little of a foal, all gangly legs and round eyes. She spoke with an accent that made her words just a little hard to understand as she said, “Vicks, it sounds like you were offering her a cigarette because you were trying to kill her.”

The first girl’s mouth dropped open in faux horror, her bright red lipstick forming a big O. “I was being generous.”

The friend shrugged her bony shoulders. “Well, she doesn’t know us. For all she knows, you were trying to infect her with cancer.” She adjusted her short, fringed leather jacket over her gold sequined dress.

“You’re from England?” I asked the skinny friend, dissecting her accent.

“Originally,” she said. “I grew up in Manchester.”

“Manchester!” I exclaimed.

“You’ve been there?” She sounded surprised.

“No, but I’ve always wanted to go.”

“Don’t. Manchester is a shithole,” she said decisively. “The whole town looks like this.” She swung her arm out to encompass the blank street of warehouses.

“The Smiths are from Manchester, though,” I said.

“And New Order,” she added, sounding proud. “And Oasis.”

“Okay, blah blah, we get it, all the world’s greatest bands come from your hometown,” the polka-dot-dress girl threw in. “Thanks for rubbing it in.”

“Only because it’s such a shithole,” the British girl said. “People have to create some kind of art so they have something to think about other than their shitty lives.”

“Yeah, but Glendale’s a shithole, too, and how many world-class musicians come from here?” countered her friend.

“You. For example.”

The polka-dot-dress girl snorted and stubbed out her cigarette on the wall. “Yeah, right. Come on, let’s go back in before I smoke another one and give us all cancer.”