Confidence. I push the sunglasses up on my head and stare straight into her foggy blue eyes. My instinct after I first lost my eye was to look away—like if I couldn’t see into somebody else’s eyes, they couldn’t see into mine. Big mistake. Then people know something is wrong. So I’ve worked at it. I’ve been whittling away at my Oklahoma accent, too, even though it’s always there, a worm wanting out of a hole.

“You’re a pretty girl,” she announces. “You shouldn’t be hiding behind those big glasses. I used to be just as pretty. I was the first homecoming queen in this town. More than sixty years ago. I rode around all night in the back of a pickup, waving my hand off, just like Trumanell Branson, thinking life was all mine. Life is never yours. You are just renting it out while the landlord in the sky ups the price until you can’t pay anymore. But what are you going to do? Like Charles Manson said, we’re all living with the death penalty.”

There’s a sharp jab of a finger in my back. The woman behind us, impatient.

It’s our turn. A hand-printed sign orders us to stick to a time limit. Ten seconds each.

I glance up. And up. Fifteen feet, at least.

They have no eyes to see.

No mouth to breathe.

I drop to my knees. The cameras draw closer.

My seeds clink against stone feet.

I stay my full ten seconds and more, until the old lady pokes me with her cane. I want to run, but the words chiseled into the pedestal remind me why I have to stay.

We will wait forever.

Not me.

I’m coming after you, you son of a bitch.

39

When I track down the old lady’s companion in the middle of the line to reunite them, he throws his arms around me and says most girls my age would not have taken the trouble. I decide he is about the right age to be the old lady’s son, but isn’t.

The front of his shirt declares the dates of Odette’s birth and disappearance. Odette was twenty-six, a meaningless number when it comes to the effect you can have on the world.

Amy Winehouse died at twenty-seven. Jesus, thirty-three. Joan of Arc, nineteen. Pocahontas, twenty. Anne Frank, fifteen.

It makes me feel better to think about them, like Odette’s part of a heroic posse. And to know that it’s not such a joke for me to try to grab a small piece of justice at eighteen with a list of names, a map, six words, and one eye.

It turns out that I am smart with one eye. I can draw and paint with one eye. Play the guitar with one eye. Pass my driver’s test the first time out with one eye. Make out with boys with one eye, although I’ve always pretended to have two. Boys never notice I don’t have two exactly perfect eyes when I am happy to show them two exactly perfect breasts.

Looking over my shoulder is literally the most natural thing in the world to me. I’m hyper-vigilant. I hug the shadows. And I’m shit out of nowhere, as my aunt used to say. I’m pretty sure Odette’s killer doesn’t even know I exist. Sometimes I’m not sure I exist.

The old lady gives me an awkward pat goodbye. She tells me to keep up my art vocabulary. She says, “I will not forget you, Angie,” and I feel a prickle of guilt.

I’ve had a lot of names over the years.

Things like Angie that I make up on the spot, for one-time-only use.

Things people nicknamed me, like Angel.

Peephole. Hole in One. Fifty-Fifty.

The Girl with One Eye being the laziest and most common.

Official ones, like my birth name, Montana Shirley Cox. Every child on my mother’s side going back three generations has been given a first name for a state, city, or country plus a middle name for a dead relative.

My mother’s name was Georgia, but she’s also dead, so if I ever have a child, I wonder if he or she will be named almost 100 percent geographically.

At the group home, I used to travel around the globe in my head, picking cities, while I focused on a spider carcass that hung from the ceiling over my bunk. For my first baby girl, I liked the name Cheyenne Georgia, although Seville Georgia was a contender. For a boy, Camden or Harlem George.

I don’t hold it against Maggie that twenty-four hours after Odette disappeared, I was sitting in a social worker’s office, getting slotted for a place that specialized in bullies and fish sticks and spider carcasses.

I made three good decisions that day—all based on what I thought Odette would want me to do.

I checked the box for perfect eyesight.

I started talking.

I told the social worker I was afraid of my father.

The social worker didn’t stick me in witness protection, but my new name, Angelica, is official, certified by a judge. Angelica Odette Dunn. Angelica for Angel. Odette for Odette. Dunn because I was done with my past life, was born again with my magic green eye, and because it seemed just anonymous enough that my father would have to hunt through a lot of Dunns to get to me.

For the last five years, I have outwitted him.

For the last four years, I have lived with a foster mom named Bunny who has believed in my heart and mind so much that a full-ride University of Texas scholarship is waiting for me in the fall.

For the last twenty minutes, I’ve been sitting outside the Blue House, trying to make up my mind about whether to risk all of the above.

The old lady was right. The Blue House has gone to hell. The lawn is half dirt. Two of the branches of the big oak out front are dragging the ground. Around its trunk, a giant yellow ribbon no longer makes a bow. The front door is boarded up, graffitied with We’re Blue W/O You.

All of it tugs at a deep, sad place inside me. Odette is never coming back.

It’s just the first day, and I’m already not sure what to do.

I wish Mary were here. Mary and I made a lot of tough decisions together. Mary, who is so pretty, even with a livid red scar down her cheek.

She slept in the bunk below me at the group home for 363 days. Every night, we smoked pot and she sung us to sleep with “I’ll Fly Away,” even though goddamn was her every other word in the daytime.

I took out my eye for Mary once, the only time I ever have for a friend. A boy had brushed by her on the sidewalk at the park and whispered, “Scarface.” When I wanted to hunt him down, all she could remember were his green Nike shoes. Mary was the toughest person I ever met, and I’ve never heard anyone cry like that. He ripped her soul like it was nothing. People don’t understand that words can rape.

I wanted Mary to know that I knew exactly what she felt like, that I wasn’t just another person saying Sorry for your loss. Pitying a girl for something wrong with her face is just one rung up from bullying her for it.

Mary is living on the street now. I wire my birthday money to her if I can figure out where she is. When I blow out the candles on my cake, I wish for her to stay alive until I can afford to get her to a plastic surgeon because a surgeon is one of the few things I can’t become with one eye.

If Mary were here, her heart would not be pounding like this.

She would say go ahead.

Break in.

40

The side door, with a cheap lock, is a nice surprise. It’s a pin-and-tumbler lock, my specialty. I talk to it in encouraging whispers while I work its insides and glance over my shoulder every three seconds. I encourage myself, too, just like I have since I stared at that spider carcass on the ceiling.

I recite in my head. Malala Yousafzai won the Nobel Peace Prize at seventeen. Louis Braille invented Braille at sixteen. Blind.

Strong. That’s what Odette thought I was when I was only thirteen and a half.

I am using the very same hairpins—bent and ready—that I used to break into the office at the group home to erase disciplinary files on my friends. The same kind of bobby pins, I think, that Trumanell used to put up her perfect bun.

I know almost as much about Trumanell as I do about Odette. I admire her almost as much. This is in part because I religiously follow a blogger who calls herself Trudette. She is a self-described conspiracy factualist. Her website is the most comprehensive of them all, linking to every single story and video on Odette and Trumanell, from the Times of London to Fox News to this town’s crappy weekly.

I like that I never know what to expect from Trudette’s blog. Did aliens snatch them? Were they Raptured up early? Would you like a step-by-step on how to achieve the perfect Trumanell bun?

Trudette’s clickbait keeps these cases alive. I picture her all sorts of ways. A soccer mom with a laptop. A reclusive high school kid who does this instead of shooting people. An FBI agent playing games, recording every visit I make.

That didn’t stop me from paying $15 to download a “new and exclusive” map of the town complete with cold case trivia and Google directions. That was the same day that I watched the five-year-old documentary on Trumanell for the seventh time. The same day I lied to Bunny and told her I was taking a last-minute senior trip to Mexico with some high school friends. I even bought the tiniest of pink bikinis to prove it.

Instead, I’m listening for the tiniest of clicks. The very last pin in the lock. When it drops, I feel it in my chest.