Peaches

gotten caught, the Bob’s Big Boy people had taken her picture and put it up in the manager’s office. Now she had to eat at Kuntry Kitchen.
    But when she’d suggested going somewhere, she hadn’t meant anything like that, anyway. She’d just turned in a report this week on a tribe of lesbian monkeys in Zambia, a topic she’d chosen to spite her ultra-homophobic AP Bio teacher, Mr. Jackson. She’d like to go to Zambia and see the lesbian monkeys. But despite the fact that she’d nailed the gay primate report, which she’d titled “We’re Here, Ooh Ee Ah Ah, Get Used to It,” Google was probably the closest Murphy would ever get to anyplace halfway exotic.
    “If we don’t do something vaguely interesting, I’m going to kill myself,” she said, hooking her index and middle fingers into the heels of her sandals and starting to walk.
    She stared at the droopy layer of branches up ahead. She and her mom had never breached them when they were both younger. It had been an unspoken thing between them: that the McGowens didn’t belong beyond the growth, that it was nice to have boundaries, and that some things were best when they were secret. Things were different now, though. Even with Google, lesbian monkeys had lost their mystery.
    Murphy’s pulse had picked up slightly, like it always did, at the thought of doing something with a high risk-to-reward ratio.
    She felt Gavin’s eyes traveling over her body behind her. Murphy took it as a matter of course. She knew what she was; she never looked in the mirror and wondered whether she was pretty or not, sexy or not. Gavin followed, not because he wanted to touch the mystery, but because he was a guy, and he couldn’t help it.
    Murphy dropped her sandals at the edge of the cool grass and tiptoed up onto the porch of Birdie Darlington’s house, where Birdie’s mother, Cynthia, the other half of the sandwich, had lived until just that morning. Murphy squinted at a plaque beside the door that proclaimed the house had been built in 1861.
    The door was locked. Murphy tiptoed over to the window to the left and tried it, sliding it open without a problem. She had shimmied through many windows—of boys’ rooms, of camp cafeterias, of the school gym. She shimmied through this one with ease, leaving Gavin standing on the grass in front of the porch, where he was without a doubt watching her butt.
    The house smelled like it had been around since 1861. Murphy let her eyes adjust to the dark and then took a few creaking steps, listening for any sound. Nothing. She was in the dining room—a good place to start. She looked through the mahogany cabinet on the far side of the room, then the sideboard cupboard. Nothing.
    She wandered out of the dining room into a hallway and then down the hallway to where it dead-ended at a small kitchen.
    There was a little round table here and some framed photographs on the walls of a woman—Mrs. Darlington, Murphy assumed—standing in a black low-rimmed hat, holding a stirrup cup, and smiling in a Botox-like way that didn’t affect anything on her face but her lips. There was one of Mrs. Darlington and a gawky young girl, tennish, standing in front of the World’s Largest Peanut. Murphy remembered seeing the two before—in Bridgewater you saw everyone eventually—the girl trailing behind her mom like a puppy. In the picture, neither of them looked too thrilled about the peanut. But they wore twin smiles, and like in the other picture, the smile looked out of place on the faces.
    A bowl lay on the floor just to the right of the table, decorated with flowers and butterflies and personalized with the words Property of Toonsis. On the table, a piece of paper lay unfolded. Murphy had spotted a pair of curtains in the far corner. Walking over and parting them, she revealed what she’d thought she would, a stacked pantry—full of cracker boxes and cereal boxes and jelly jars filled with preserves and bags of bread. On the top shelf, tucked between a package of napkins and a bag of marshmallows, was a bottle. Crème de menthe.
    Well, it beat nothing.
    Biting her full bottom lip, Murphy stepped onto the bottom shelf to reach it, frowning as she pulled it down and swilled around the liquid inside. It was only about a quarter full. As she stepped down, she lost her balance slightly and landed on the linoleum with a little thud.
    Damn. She froze and listened.
    Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap. From directly above her head camethe sound of paws on