Mom got on the phone the minute we walked through the door.

“You release that girl this instant! What do you mean by arresting her in front of the whole town like that? Did you even think about her poor parents? Well, it’s your department I feel sorry for, because you are going to be hit with such a lawsuit—”

The cop at the other end of the phone let Mom rant. A wise move. Mom’s a ranter, even when she’s not ill. She has to get that first rush of adrenalin out of her system when she’s angry. Only then can she discuss something halfway calmly. Unless she’s ill. When she’s ill, there’s no calming her down. I listened for the telltale shrillness but didn’t hear it. She was just angry.

She kept on being angry. From the short spurts of silence, I could tell the cop was getting a few words in here and there, but Mom was still fuming when she hung up the phone.

“And I didn’t do anything!” she wailed—in my direction but really to herself. “I didn’t try to stop them!”

“It was all over in a few seconds,” my father pointed out as he undid his necktie. My father always spoke in a bland voice to counteract my mother’s wildness. “There was no time for any of us to react. And what could we do—take her away from the police? They’ll realize they’ve made a mistake and let her go.”

Mom hadn’t yet wound down to her rational stage, so I knew Dad’s comments would be wasted. I went up to my room and shut the door. I had enough of my own emotions to sort out without taking on Mom’s as well.

I hung up my church dress then sat down on my unmade bed. Camp was over. There was no need to tidy my bunk for cabin inspection, like I had every morning for the past eight weeks. There were no little campers to bully into doing likewise.

None of my regular clothes were clean. Not a single pair of shorts, not one t-shirt. Camp had ended three days before, but I still hadn’t tackled my enormous bag of laundry. Casey had done hers at camp. She had far fewer clothes than I did. She washed them out every night in the bathroom and hung them to dry on the clothesline outside the cabin, or on the end of her bunk if the weather was bad.

“I’ve got to learn to live in the field,” she once said to me as she rinsed out her socks.

“Have at it,” I replied. “I’m going to be a gym teacher, not an entomologist. I’ll live in a house with a washing machine and spend my free time adding up my pension. You’ll spend your life crawling in the dirt and drying the same three pairs of socks in the smoke of your campfire.”

“Jealousy is unbecoming,” she said, flicking water at me from a clean, wet sock.

Casey is orderly. She’s a scientist. I’m a jock. I’m a mess.

I mean I was a jock. Now I don’t know what I am.

And, to tell the truth, I wasn’t much of a jock. To be a real jock you have to care about winning—and winning took too much effort.

I didn’t really want to be a gym teacher, either. People were always asking me what I wanted to be. I had to tell them something so they’d leave me alone.

The only clothing I had that was remotely clean was a pair of pajamas. I put them on, then picked up my duffel bag and hauled it down to the basement. I emptied it out onto the laundry-room floor.

There it was, the whole summer spread out before me—shorts from hot days, jeans from campfire nights, socks with grass stains, t-shirts with little splats of blood from mosquitos slapped too late. I held a sweatshirt up to my face. It smelled of wood smoke.

I didn’t bother to sort out the light clothes from dark. They were camp clothes. They were used to rough treatment.

I shoved as much laundry as I could into the washer. The noise of the machine muffled the sound of my mother’s voice. I closed the basement door to block out the rest. Then I sat down in the beat-up chair we keep in the laundry room—one of Mom’s “projects.” She’d always meant to take an upholstery class and redo it. Casey’s father offered to help her, since that’s one of the things he did for a living, but she could never decide on what fabric to use.

Our laundry room was also a storage room. The shelves were full of projects my mother had started then abandoned but couldn’t part with. My own past was there, too—a guitar, a chess set, an easel and some dried-up acrylics, a tennis racket, lots of things that didn’t work out. My parents kept encouraging me. Casey kept encouraging me. It was all really annoying.

I listened to the thwack-thwack of the washing machine and thought about how strange it was to be doing ordinary things while my best friend was in jail for murder.

Then I remembered. Casey was supposed to go to Australia in December for four months. She’d been accepted on some professor’s field team to study insects there. It was a big deal for someone still in high school.

I guess you won’t be going to Australia now, Praying Mantis, I thought. She wouldn’t be leaving me on my own after all.

Something else nagged at me, something I couldn’t quite name. It didn’t feel good.

I didn’t want to think anymore, so I went upstairs to get something to eat.

“Close the door,” Mom said, as she always did when I stood in front of an open fridge. “We don’t need to refrigerate the whole house.”

I took out the milk and closed the door. Mom hadn’t made anything for lunch. In fact, she was still in her church clothes. I decided on bread and peanut butter.

Mom was glaring at the phone.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You think you know a town,” she replied. “You think you know the people in it, and the things they stand for, and the lines of decency they will not cross. Then something like this happens.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked again.

“I’ve called ten people from our church, ten people who have known the Whites since they came to this town. None of them will go down to the police station with me.”

“You’re going to the police station?”

“And that Reverend Fleet! He said he would pray for them!”

“Isn’t that his job?”

“His job is to come down to the police station with me and help correct this terrible injustice. Jesus Christ the Lord could be in that cell and Reverend Fleet would not put himself out. I told him that. And do you know what he said? He said, ‘Kathy Glass is a member of our community, too.’ As if one has anything to do with the other!”

I took a bite of my sandwich. The peanut butter gobbed up in my mouth. I had to wash it down with a big gulp of milk.

“I wonder what Casey’s having for lunch,” I said. “Maybe we should take her some sandwiches.”

Mom looked at me, hard, with one of her deep, searching looks. “Jessica Jude, why aren’t you more upset about this?”

“I am upset,” I said. “I’m just…stunned, is all.”

“Well, get unstunned,” she snapped. “Being stunned won’t help your friend.”

Mom turned back to the phone book.

I chewed on my sandwich and listened to her try to persuade people to go to the police station with her. She wasn’t clear what they would do once they got there, other than demand the police let Casey go. It wasn’t much of a plan, but that’s Mom.

Of course the plan went nowhere.

“We need a nickname for you,” Casey says to me one day when we are playing in the patch of meadow near the schoolyard. She is looking at a blue dragonfly that has perched on her arm. “What kind of things do you like?”

I don’t know. I’m not really all that interested in anything. I just pass through each day as it comes to me.

When I don’t answer, she looks up at me.

“You’re wearing the same color,” she says.

I don’t understand, and then I look at the dragonfly. She’s right. We are wearing the same shade of blue.

“We can call you Dragonfly,” she suggests.

And Dragonfly becomes my nickname.

That night, I woke up when the bedroom was still dark. My clock radio read two a.m. I tried to get back to sleep, but I couldn’t get comfortable.

Ride your bike, a voice inside my head kept saying. I tried reading, but not even that would shut the voice up. Tired of struggling, I rolled out of bed and dressed.

Mom is a light sleeper, even when she isn’t ill. The last thing I wanted was to wake her up. I cringed at every squeak in the floor but managed to get outside without her coming out of her room.

I’d never been biking at that hour of the morning. The town was quiet. I biked from street to street, feeling like the only person awake in the whole world.

I biked over to the police station and circled around and in front of the place where Casey was being held. I imagined her chained to a dungeon wall. Then I imagined her being so busy examining the fleas and lice in the cell that she didn’t even notice the chains. That image made me smile.

It occurred to me what that feeling was—the feeling that had been nagging at me ever since I’d watched Casey being taken away.

I was stuck here in a normal life, in boring old Galloway. Casey had been whisked up into something new, away from me. While I was doing chores and getting ready for school, she was surrounded by excitement, the center of attention. Casey had left me behind.

I was all alone.

And I didn’t like it one bit.

We are in grade seven, spending the afternoon at Ten Willows on a warm September Saturday. It is off-season at the camp, so we have the place to ourselves.

Casey is watching a spider suck the blood out of a fly. She is completely absorbed.

After a while, she says, “I’m going to need to specialize. There are so many insects—over a million different species have been identified. I can’t possibly learn about all of them! I could specialize in spiders, but I don’t think so. And I don’t think it’s butterflies, either. Beetles? I like beetles. A lot. Maybe beetles. But which beetles? There are so many different ones.”

I am bored. “Let’s do something,” I say.

“I am doing something,” she replies. “Look, you can actually see the spider’s fangs! I think it’s eating an anthomyiid fly.”

I pick up a stick and swirl it through the web, ripping it apart. Then I fling it all away.

“She wasn’t finished her lunch,” Casey says.

“Let’s do something!”

“You need a hobby,” Casey says. She walks away to look for another bug.

She sounds just like my mother. I am so upset I walk away from her. Then I start running. I run and run, all around the camp trails, just to get away. When I get back to where I started, Casey isn’t there.

She’s gone looking for me, I think, feeling smug that I’ve made her break off her bug search. I sit, panting from my run, and then decide to go looking for her.

It takes a while.

I find her kneeling on the boardwalk that leads through the marsh. She is looking down at whirligig beetles and pond skaters. She is gently prodding the pond skaters with a thin reed and watching them skim over the surface of the water.

She looks up at the sound of my sneakers on the boardwalk.

“Isn’t this amazing?” she says. “All these different forms of life in one small space—bugs and spiders and birds and plants. I think maybe this is it. I think maybe I’ll specialize in aquatic insects.”

“I’ve been running,” I tell her. “All over camp.”

“That’s it,” she says. “You should be a cross-country runner.”