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Ava took this opportunity to turn and start down the aisle, glancing around for Travis in the thinning crowd, but didn’t see him.

There was Nance, though, sitting in the chair watching her, looking small and forlorn and pasty pale. Why was she staring at Ava?

Ava walked right past her and out through the bustling lobby into the blinding sunlight and the blistering concrete and all the cars, looking for Travis. He was gone.

* * *

“Who was that guy you were talking to earlier?” Suzi asked her when they were in Nance’s car, racing home like they were going to a fire. “The one in the costume. I’ve seen him before. He’s bizarre.”

Ava didn’t want to give greedy little Suzi any more information, or ammunition, than she already had. “I’ve never seen him before in my life,” Ava said, remembering too late that Travis might be on the Wakulla trip and she’d have to keep lying. She was just as bad as Nance and Suzi. She was the liar filling in the pressed liar sandwich.

There was something else she’d been lying about. She had barely passed algebra last spring, and her mother had sent in her application to Rhodes College. But even though she’d told her mother she wanted to go there, she didn’t, and she wouldn’t. Ava had wanted to be so many things along the way as she was growing up; and maybe because of her mom’s encouragement, she’d been certain she could do any of them, although she’d never admit this to her mother. Her father didn’t care what she did, didn’t expect her to accomplish anything, the way her mother did. She had no idea what she really wanted to accomplish, beyond being an Elvis fan and America’s next top model. But being a fan wasn’t a career and the model thing, if she did get it, wouldn’t last long. All she knew is that she wanted to eventually be a grown-up—finish college, just a state school, nothing fancy, and live on her own for a while, then get married and have a family. But this wasn’t anything she could ever say aloud to anyone. It was too ordinary, not flashy enough. More like a log cabin instead of Genesis Church.

* * *

Buff came for Suzi and Ava the following Saturday morning. He pulled up into their driveway in a big black SUV, the kind of car her parents always spoke scornfully of. He had called the day before and talked to her mother about the outing, and her mother later told Ava that he wanted to take his own car to Wakulla Springs because riding on the bus made him motion sick, and, well, since they were in the same neighborhood, he thought he’d just swing by to pick up Suzi and Ava. Her mom seemed to think it was okay, so it must be.

Buff came inside, in his polo shirt, knee-length madras shorts, and sports sandals, like something out of the Lands’ End catalog, and talked to her mother for a few minutes in a soothing, reassuring voice, promising that he’d have her “lovely daughters” back by five p.m.

Even though Suzi sat in the backseat on the way down to the park, she managed to insert herself into the conversation constantly. Buff asked Ava questions about her interests, her plans, her goals. She told him she got As in everything except math, which was mostly true. She told him she planned to go to Rhodes College in Memphis, if she could get in, but beyond that she didn’t know.

“I’m going to get a soccer scholarship,” Suzi announced, “to one of those Ivy League schools, like Harvard, and be an archaeologist.”

Ava let out a big sigh, and to her surprise, Buff winked at her.

“Must be nice to have it all figured out, Suzi Q,” he said. “But the Lord might have other plans for you!”

“Huh,” Suzi said, clearly doubting that anyone, including the Lord God almighty, could interfere in her plans.

Every time Ava glanced over at Buff, he was looking at her with that intense gaze that she didn’t know the meaning of. After a while she forced herself not to look at him.

At Wakulla Springs State Park, which was about half an hour south of Tallahassee, they met up with the other youths, who were disembarking from a big white bus with Genesis