They had stayed at the caves longer than they intended, and the ride home was longer than Alma remembered. The sun was rising as she pedaled up to her house, and it had risen by the time she climbed in her window.
And her parents were there, sitting side by side on her bed.
“Alma!” Her mother leaped to her feet. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and she was gripping her phone with both hands. “What’s happening? Where were you? Why are you covered in mud?”
“I’m not,” Alma said. She put her hands, dirt-streaked, behind her back. As if that would help. As if her entire self wasn’t coated in earth.
“Is this what you’ve been doing?” Her father shut her window, hard. “Sneaking out in the middle of the night?”
“I just went into the backyard,” Alma said. “Like last time.”
“And rolled around on the ground?” her father asked.
“Yes,” Alma said. “No. I don’t know.”
Alma had known this would happen eventually. She had snuck out of her window five times now, and three of those times she had stayed out for hours. She had gone all over Four Points—to the source of a stream, to the top of a mountain, under the ground. She was actually surprised she hadn’t been caught—really and truly caught—before now.
She was also surprised when she felt her heartbeat speed up. She felt her muscles tighten. She felt her face tense, not into a smile but into a hard, unapologetic expression. She had been having panic attacks for months, and her parents hadn’t been able to help her. They had told her what to do and told her she was doing it wrong and told her to keep trying. They had made it worse.
Her parents were the ones who had started all these problems.
“I was about to call the police, did you know that?” her father said. “This is completely unacceptable!”
“And scary,” Alma’s mother said. “Do you know how scary it was for us to come in here and find you missing?”
“Okay, I wasn’t in the backyard. I was in the Preserve,” Alma said, the lie slipping off her tongue easily, defiantly. “I woke up early, and I wanted to be outside. You know I like to be outside. That’s all I was doing.”
Her parents studied her, her mother’s look full of open concern, her father’s fear coated in a layer of anger.
“Today is your appointment with the psychologist,” he finally said. “We’re going to call and let him know about this. We need—we need a plan. We need to figure out what to do here.”
Then, before Alma could stop him, he picked up the quintescope case from the floor.
“I’m taking this,” he said, heading toward the door. “I don’t know what you think you were doing with it, but that’s over now.”