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pregnant.” His cheeks were warm before he finished speaking.
    Mia tilted her head toward her left shoulder and stuck her lips out. Other people bit the sides of their mouths, scratched their heads, or did something else equally predictable, but Mia made a face like a fish when she was thinking. “Did you have something to tell me?”
    â€œI’m supposed to remind you about the paving.” Homer nudged a soda can in front of his left foot and then stepped on it, trying to shift his weight as slowly as possible to draw out the satisfying sound of crunching metal.
    â€œPaving?”
    â€œThe lot. Tomorrow.”
    â€œOh, right.” Mia scooted back—left, right, left, right—until she could reach the mast and pull against it to stand. “Geeza Louisa. Getting up was so much easier without Tadpole on board.”
    â€œYou can stay with us. My dads said to tell you. For, like, as long as you need. No problem.”
    â€œOkay.” Mia looked down, met Homer’s gaze, then looked at her interlaced fingers. Her unreadable expression might as well have been a punch in Homer’s stomach.
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    â€œYou say ‘sorry’ way too much, Homer.”
    â€œYeah. Sorry. Shit.”
    Mia shook her head. Her eyes were obscured by loose strands of red drifting across her face. “Tell your dads it’s no big deal. I’ll be okay.”
    â€œYou sure? Because I can—”
    â€œYup. Well, I’ve got to get Tadpole some breakfast and finish my makeup. I’ll be over in twenty.”
    â€œGreat. Okay.” If Homer had been a different person, he would have told her that she didn’t need to wear makeup. He would have said, “You look amazing without it.” But he wasn’t a different person. He was only himself. So he nodded, waved, and walked out through the gate made of beautiful junk, across a cracked parking lot sprinkled with broken things.

THE PARABLE OF THE ANYWHERE GIRL
    BEFORE THEY KNEW HER NAME, they called her the Anywhere Girl.
    Her accent was unplaceable, untraceable. The hue of her skin fell somewhere between wet driftwood and cold syrup. Her features seemed shaped by a watercolor brush. When she had rolled into town, her fingertips were still stained with the dye she’d used to color her hair bright, plastic red. More often than not, she smelled like burned sugar and warm clay.
    â€œPretty” wasn’t the right word for her. “Beautiful”? “Lovely”? Those didn’t quite work either. She was another word, a word that had not yet been made up.
    People who claimed to remember her arrival on that June day said they heard her before they saw her. According to some, her truck had clicked and clacked like it had marbles in its engine and the small sailboat it was pulling on a time-forgotten trailer fought the twisted ropes tying it down. When she hadpulled into the lot at the end of the boardwalk, the truck had made a sound like a large man wheezing, then shuddered, and then died. Never to run again.
    Between the strong push of the Caribbean winds and the powerful pull of the currents from the Gulf, the Island at the End of the World—or at least Florida—rarely had rainy days. But the morning after the Anywhere Girl’s entrance, the sky darkened, the clouds thickened, and it poured for a week.
    The first time the Anywhere Girl came into La Isla Souvenirs, she was barefoot and didn’t say a word. The second time, she wore flip-flops that smacked against the wooden floor like she had flyswatters attached to her feet, and she didn’t stop speaking until she had a job and a new pair of sunglasses.
    The store’s owners hired her without asking too many questions. It was only later that they thought to wonder, Why did we do that? Maybe it was how the small gap between her front teeth gave certain words a whistle or maybe it was the rambling way she spoke, jumping from