You settle back in your chair by the window on the land side and watch Toronto slip away. You clickity-clack past where you slept last night on a construction site rolled in a painter’s drop cloth. The train picks up and speeds past the abandoned building where you’ve been sleeping for the last few weeks, faster and faster, until you pass by where you were born and where you lived until May, and then the Beaches, where Nanny Dee and Granda Trick lived. Live. Lived. Your whole young life is mapped out along the edge of the lake. You are traveling backward in time. You are slipping right out of life as you know it, Blink.

Pretty soon you’re speeding along the shore of Lake Ontario, and since there aren’t too many people on this early morning train, you move to the lake side of the car and stare, tired-eyed, out at the endlessness of water, so wide it seems there is no other shore to it. You ride along the crest of a cliff that tumbles down into the sun-speckled water. The Scarborough Bluffs. You’ve heard of the bluffs, but they might as well have been the pyramids of Egypt, for all you knew.

And the lake . . . God, from up here it stretches to forever. Is this the water in the picture of Alyson? Does she live beside the same lake? You dig the picture out and hold it up to the window with the lake behind it. Could be.

You settle back in your seat. But you can’t settle. The excitement of your escape and the anticipation of what lies ahead suddenly give way to the little earthquake that happened back at the train station. More like a blue tornado. If you close your eyes, you can still feel her fingernails scrape your palm as she lifts every last bill from your palm. You squeeze your eyes tight to fight back the tears.

It seems that the world is achingly full of people who want to rip you off. Pretty people, which is what makes it worse.

You have six or seven dollars in your pocket in change, and that’s it. Well, if Alyson expects help, she is going to have to pay for it. Big-time. You aren’t going to let anything like this happen to you ever again. And getting money out of her was always part of the plan, wasn’t it, boyo?

A man comes along with a noisy cart, and you are able to afford a sweet thing that the wrapper claims to be a Danish. It’s cold and hard and stale.

You close your eyes, but she’s waiting there for you. April. She flits in blue across your mind’s eye. Fast. Too fast for you. But you catch her, anyway, tackle her. Take the money back.

You’re not sure which is worse: the loss of the cash or the burning humiliation.

It’s about three hours to Kingston. You let the girl in blue go, and when you do, you feel giddy inside about what lies ahead, like when you were a kid at Canada’s Wonderland, lining up for Top Gun, hoping you’d be tall enough to get to ride it this time. You are going to enjoy this trip despite what happened. You stare out across the gray-green water, the light bouncing off the steely flatness into your blinking, tearing eyes. You squint and see a sailboat. Then, even as you watch, the sailboat keels, capsizes, sinks. All hands lost.

Captain Panic is at work. He isn’t happy about the incident at the train station. It confirms his most terrible fears about you. He doesn’t want you to think about what might be possible. He only ever wants you to reflect on how stupid you are.

Shhh, you hear another voice inside you whisper. An Irish voice. You aren’t stupid, not a bit. Forget the fact that you are heading into what has all the outward signs of being some kind of trap. You are not blind. You told Alyson you’d be arriving by bus at four. Not by train at eleven. That’s how un-stupid you are.