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I didn’t want to be late for meeting Arlo. I thought Grandpa’s watch was going to help me. Now, the words make my blood run cold. Not a stone tell where I lie.

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    Any minute a great commotion is going to come for me. Any minute, my father’s going to bust through that door and take me home, and Dobbs Hordin will be marched off to the county jail.
Any minute becomes just like every other minute.
    I can’t decide which I hate more: the quiet or the dark.
    Wait. What had Dobbs said about glow sticks? Where did he say those were kept?
    The blackout has done a number on my balance, so I get on my knees. I navigate my way over to the right, where I am hoping the kitchen still is. With hands patting dead air, I shuffle forward until I hit something. Feeling around its rounded edges doesn’t help. I can’t fathom what it is. Several steps to the left is the counter. I stand up. Everything on it is unfamiliar. Why hadn’t I paid closer attention when the lights were on? Something clatters at my feet, and something else bangs down on the floor. A can, maybe. After a sweep of the counter, I find the burner. The space below is covered by a curtain. Behind it are pots and pans and a stack of plastic containers. I am in the ballpark. In one of them, I find the glow sticks. I have to use my teeth to tear through the plastic wrapper. I snap one. A sporing of neon green light. There are my hands; there are my elbows, my legs, my feet. Still in one piece. I snap another one. In the green glow just three feet away, and not the half mile I imagined, is the table. By the time I’m done, there are half a dozen sticks glowing throughout the room. It’s like one of those toxic algae blooms down at the reservoir in the spring.
    I look at Grandpa’s watch. It’s a little past midnight, which means six hours have passed since we first arrived at the picnic. Only six hours separate me from my life. Six hours ago, I was watching my town do what it does best. With the carnival set up between the old school and the fire station and crowds jamming the sidewalks, downtown was barely recognizable. Main Street was lined from K-10 to city hall with parade floats, tractors, hay wagons, and vintage cars gussied up with banners and apple-cheeked officials. If an outsider were to have driven by, he’d have likely mistaken Eudora for the land of milk and honey. It wasn’t only the festival; nature helped put on a show, too. Summer’s always when our town looks its best, like it is yay-close to living up to its potential. The creek runs full, the trees are so leafy it’s a wonder we don’t get light-headed walking beneath them, and the sun brightens colors like a washing detergent commercial. Fall’s more honest. It shows our town as it truly is: worn-out. A ghost town except with the people still in it. Come October, it’ll look like someone needs to take a great big broom to the place. Yards will be stacked with dead leaves; trash will have blown against the chain-link fences; flower beds in tractor tires will have dried up. The only signs of life will be old vans parked in cracked driveways and the occasional dog tethered to a stake in a yard. Nobody will be outside. Instead, waxy children with stringy hair will be playing silently indoors, trying not to get on their parents’ last frayed nerve. But the weekend of the Horse Thieves Picnic in the middle of summer: well, it gets everyone’s hopes up. Especially someone on her way to meet Arlo Meier.
I knew what Mama was going to ask, so before she had a chance to open her mouth, I told her I had to run. Having none of it, she thrust Theo at me and repositioned her bun.
    “But I’m supposed to meet someone in a few minutes.”
    “Who?” Mama was ill-tempered on account of Theo’s tantrum. He was insisting on riding his trike down the parade route, even with a sudden fever.
    “Mercy,” I fibbed.
    “Well, surely she can wait while you walk your brother down the parade. It won’t take