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She wandered back to the Bennington and clieons She had that coiled tightness ballooning in her chest, like her skin was on too tight Like she’d come around a blind corner, and every de Will lectured about belief in the supernatural, but the only ghosts that frightened Evie were the very real ghosts inside her Soht I won’t be such an awful irl I won’t lose o too far with a joke and feel the rooood and kind and sensible and patient The sort everyone loves But by evening, her good intentions would have unraveled She’d say the wrong thing or talk a little too loudly She’d take a dare she shouldn’t, just to be noticed Perhaps Mabel was right, and she was selfish But as the point of living so quietly you made no noise at all? "Oh, Evie, you’re too much," people said, and it wasn’t complimentary Yes, she was too much She felt like too much inside all the tih?

Evie stared at the long colu across the street So many s Who lived behind them? Were they happy? Or did they sometimes sit on a rooftop haunted by a deep loneliness for which there seemed to be no cure?

The door creaked open on its hinges and Jericho angled his broad shoulders through the opening "Thought I ht find you here What happened with your uncle Will?"

Evie turned her face away and wiped her eyes "I stirred the tea counterclockwise"

Jericho slid down the wall, keeping a respectable distance between the To the south, the sun glinted off the steel tip of a building Smoke belched from rooftop chiley’s Speareons arched their necks, hunting for food

"You asked me about how I caht away," Jericho started He pulled a heel of bread from his pocket and unwrapped it

"No, you didn’t," Evie said Once, she’d been very curious about that She couldn’t see that it rateful to Jericho for co to co "Will you tell me now?"

He squinted in the sun "I was raised on a far fars seeet"

"Sounds swell," Evie said, hoping her words didn’t sound as hollow as they felt

Jericho waited for a spell, as if gathering words "There was an epidemic Infantile paralysis It took my sister first And then I woke up with a fever By the tiot s and ar I was nine"

As he spoke, Jericho tore the bread into tiny pieces, which he tossed onto the flat tar roof for the birds, armed the food

"They puton called an iron lung It breathes for you Of course, you’re trapped inside it--like a , watching the light from the s behind me shift like a sundial My on every Sunday and pray for me But there’s a lot to do on a farm, and there were two other children back home and another on the way Soon it was every other Sunday Then she just stopped co" Jericho broke upbirds "I told et to Philadelphia on the roads I toldthe sorts of things you’ll make yourself believe"

Evie wasn’t sure what she should say, so she kept quiet and watched the birds clustering around the food, fighting for it

"Then I heard a bird chirping on the sill, signaling spring I knew that if the bird could get there, so could she I knew the minute I heard that bird outsideback Even before the doctors told ned the papers that made me a ward of the state, I knew"

Jericho wiped his hands on his handkerchief

"How could your parents just leave you?" Evie asked after a while

"Invalids don’t grow up to work plows or threshing machines I was beyond their care And they had other mouths to feed"