Almost immediately, things start to go wrong. Lucy fails to show up at the end of Harriet’s driveway at 11p.m., and it doesn’t take a genius to realize that the soft-spoken, lip-biting, knee-jiggling girl has chickened out. The remaining three kids scowl and shift their Super Soakers from one hand to the other, run their tongues over their braces and squint into the mosquito-bitten night. The plan won’t work unless everyone’s on board, and already Mikey is looking like he might want to dip too, to slink back home to his periwinkle-painted bedroom and burrow underneath his stupid baby-blue blankets and forget about the whole thing.
          But Harriet won’t let that happen. She’s the eldest—thirteen candles on her cake last Saturday—and she’s got the biggest bone to pick with Tabby. It was Tabby who spread the rumor that Harriet’s parents were related, it was Tabby who swiped her charm bracelet out of her locker during gym, and Harriet won’t let this plan go down the drain like Tabby’s blood, the blood that she insists on washing out of her underwear in the school bathroom sinks, which is gross as hell and should probably be illegal. Tabby needs to be taught a lesson, even if she can’t ever be civilized. The bitch is named after a cat, for fuck’s sake.
          They creep through the late summer evening to Tabby’s house. She lives right next to the woods, and as they approach, the sound of crickets grows louder. The chirping seems to emanate not from hidden insects but from the darkness itself, from the blackness between the trees. All around them are tiny dots of fireflies, blinking in and out of existence like hallucinated stars. 
          On the side facing the forest, looking weirdly lonely as it protrudes from the rest of the house, is Tabby’s bedroom. What kind of parents would buy a house with their daughter’s bedroom all set up by itself on one end? You’d think they hate her just as much as Harriet and Mikey and Sophia do. Every evening Tabby’s bedroom floats separate from the rest of the house, surrounded by darkness on three sides. The prow of a ship sticking out into the night, looking at nothing, going nowhere.
          “She doesn’t even mind mosquito bites,” Harriet hisses, as the three of them edge closer to the house. “See? There aren’t even any screens in the windows.”
          She’s right; Tabby’s bedroom windows are yanked up as far as they’ll go, and the lights in her room are so bright they’re practically screaming as they spill out into the yard. Talk about inviting the bugs in for a late-night snack. Beyond, where the woods begin, darkness unrolls like a tongue.
          “Maybe the mosquitoes are her friends.” That’s Sophia, her giggle like the dry squeal of a hinge. Harriet hisses at her to be quiet.
          “Where is she?” Mikey whispers. “Shouldn’t she be sleeping?” 
          “Dunno. Maybe she’s having an underwear-washing party in the bathroom or something. We just need to wait until she’s back.” 
          They take their positions, crouching, one at each window. The vines and bushes around the house provide more than adequate cover, brushing their cheeks and shoulders with smooth, leathery leaves, muffling them into statues. Whenever Tabby deigns to return to her bedroom, she’ll be hit with a Super Soaker deluge of red liquid from three sides at once. Think Carrie, only less pig blood, more paint.
          They know what to do. On Harriet’s third click, we fire. Harriet’s been practicing her tongue-clicks all afternoon. 
          Footsteps, finally, but they’re too heavy to be those of a twelve-year-old girl. The person sits down on the bed in the middle of the room. The mattress squeaks, as though in pain. 
          Outside, the kids fidget, not knowing what part of their plan this fits into. Their squirt guns sag in their hands. The situation is starting to feel a little off. They want to get on with it: unleash their Super Soakers, paint the room red, and then get the hell out of there.
          From somewhere else in the house, the sound of sobbing. The three kids hear it at first like it might be coming from the TV, but then it gets louder and louder and another person enters the room, bringing her sobs with her, hauling them along like a bag of sodden laundry.
          “Shut up,” the man on the bed says. The crying stops immediately. “Why you got all the damn windows open? You trying to sneak away somewhere?”
          “No.” It’s an exhalation, a tiny sound. It doesn’t sound like Tabby at all. Tabby’s usually running her mouth, hee-hawing her braying laugh, spitting on the floor as she walks to class. Hiking up her shorts during gym to show off her quads, big ugly blocks of muscle that are larger than the boys’. Not standing in the middle of a room like a mouse in a field, small and still and afraid.
          “You know it’s not good to keep them open. You’ll get bit.”
          “I was hot.” Even quieter now.
          Harriet’s hand creeps up to scratch her neck, where the leaves, so soft and quiet, are brushing across her skin. Soon that patch of skin will be a brilliant rouge, as bright as the paint they were going to flood Tabby’s room with. She scratches slowly, her bitten nails spreading more and more of the oils into her skin, digging the poison in deeper, and the male voice comes again:
          “Come here, Tabitha.”
          Silence.
          “Are you gonna be good or not?”
          The rustling of starched cotton. A sniffle.
          “Is that a no?” His voice is wet and clogged, like he has too much spit, too much liquid everywhere inside him. The air feels thin and unsure. A pulse about to stop.
          The sound of something unzipping.
          Then a flurry of movement, a louder squeak from the bed. The man says something, too low to hear—and then a hiss, a thwack, a gasping choke.
          Finally Harriet stands, looks in the window. Tabby is sitting at the head of the bed, and lying on his back in front of her, head almost in her lap, is a man with his shirt and pants both half off, and she’s pulling at something that she’s got wrapped around his throat, something so thin it’s almost invisible, her arms sinewed as she spreads them in the air, pulling and pulling the wire around his throat, yanking it tighter and tighter, and his arms are trying to flail but she’s holding them down with her legs pushed straight out in front of her, her calves and quads bulging, her teeth gritted in a vulpine snarl, and her eyes are hot black marbles and below her, the man’s face is purpling with blood and his eyes are white and rolling back in his skull—
          Harriet ducks back down, stumbles out from the bush. Runs for the road. And as though they’ve been waiting for a cue—they never did get their three clicks—Mikey and Sophia crash out from behind their shrubs and all three of them run full-pelt down the driveway, careening onto the road, sprinting to their street and only slowing to a halt once they’ve made it to Harriet’s place. They’re panting, sucking in lungfuls of air and coughing up bugs, their bodies hot and itchy and streaming with sweat. And as they look into each other’s faces, their gazes swinging from one pair of eyes to the next, they know that Tabby’s secret is safe with them. They know they won’t ever, ever say a single word.