"What? No. They'll probably break their necks getting back to us. But you shouldn't spend money you don't have to!"

"Uh, Mrs. Meriwether, don't you get a bigger commission if I pay the asking price?"

Mrs. Meriwether shut her mouth with a snap. She put her hands primly together and said, "So. Offer the asking price?"

Davy frowned. He didn't want all of Mrs. Meriwether's friends discussing the family that paid asking price in a buyer's market. "Offer them ninety percent."

They closed two weeks later.

SIX.

"Or is it to be a food fight?"

New Prospect is in the American Southwest, about two hours' drive from Durango. If you do the maps thing you'll find that this circle could put New Prospect in Arizona, New Mexico, or Utah, as well as Colorado. And the map thing would show that there isn't a town called New Prospect in any of those states. An internet search shows towns of that name in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas, and a place called Nova Prospekt in Eastern Europe near the Black Sea.

That's because my New Prospect doesn't exist, not by that name. And if I'm lying about the name, keep in mind that I might be lying about other things, too.

But there is a town, somewhere, that we drove into, about lunchtime, in early January, in a large U-Haul truck, with Mom driving, Dad fidgeting on the passenger side, and me bouncing up and down between them.

The town was situated on an elevated bench, one side backed onto the mountainside, the other sloped down into the arid scrub of the lower foothills. Ten inches of snow had fallen the week before but the roads had been plowed. Though melted snow had refrozen into occasional patches of black ice, the asphalt on State Road 87 was mostly clear and dry.

"That's the municipal complex," Dad said, pointing. "Courthouse, city hall, and police. The middle school is over there-see, between those two buildings?"

I knew all this. I'd been studying the town for a month, using online maps and satellite images, blogs, photo galleries, and official and unofficial websites. But Dad was nervous, so I let him rattle on.

"The middle school used to be the high school, but they built a new one when they decided it made more sense to bring kids from this side of the reservation here, rather than bus them forty-five miles to the on-reservation school."

We went a few more blocks and passed the County Medical Center, a three-story hospital with an attached building for medical professionals, and a helicopter pad near the ER driveway.

Mom turned onto Main Street, an old-fashioned avenue where the new buildings were built to blend with the late nineteenth-century architecture. The streets were concrete but with a surface molded like cobblestones. I'd walked on real cobblestones in Europe and nearly broken my ankle. I wondered what the local emergency room frequency for knee and ankle injuries was. Good thing it was only a few blocks away.

Though it was mostly cloudy, a patch of open sky was letting the sun hit the north side of the street. A bunch of teens were out in the sunshine on the corner outside a coffee shop. I stared at them as we went by.

Dad saw me looking and glanced over at the corner, reading the sign on the coffee shop. "Java, East of Krakatoa. Way, way east. I wonder if any of those kids have seen the movie?"

"What movie?"

"It was called, Krakatoa, East of Java. Krakatau, the volcano, is actually west of Java, but that's Hollywood for you. At least the store has it right."

"Indonesia," I said, half asking.

"Yeah. Biggest volcanic eruption in modern history. An explosion, really. Heard thousands of miles away."

I was only half listening, more intent on the kids-what they looked like, what they were wearing, but it was hard to tell since they were bundled up for the cold. At least my snowboarding jacket would fit in.

"Did you hear it?" I asked, absently.

Mom laughed and Dad said, "I'm not that old. It was in the 1800s. I wasn't even born when the movie came out. I caught part of it on afternoon TV when I was a boy."

We left the downtown area behind and threaded toward the lower edge of town, passing the high school and then a set of four grain silos that reminded me of our trip to Merredin, Western Australia.

The property sloped deeply away from the road. A garage with a short drive was level with the road, but the house itself was down the hill. A gravel driveway ran all the way down to the house, but it was scary steep.

The snow was piled high to the sides and Dad and I got out to direct Mom before she backed down the hill.

"Who plowed the driveways?" I asked.

Dad said, "Mrs. Meriwether, the Realtor, got someone to do it."

My heart skipped a beat when the truck backed over the edge, the thing was still at an angle to the road and it lurched alarmingly to one side, but then it completed the turn and righted itself while still angled down the steep hill. It did slip backward once, when all four wheels were on the packed snow, but Mom got it down the driveway and stopped beside the house without further scares.

When she'd climbed down from the cab she said, "I'm afraid it won't make it up the hill with that snow there."

Dad looked around. The property was wooded, a mixture of cedar, pinon, and a bunch of bare deciduous trees I couldn't identify without their leaves. Despite the bare limbs, the combination was thick enough to hide the neighboring houses from view. "I'll take care of the snow before its time to get it back up the hill."

"Oh, look," Mom said.

There was a banner across the door saying "Welcome!"

"Mrs. Meriwether?" Mom said.

Dad shrugged. "Probably. Like I said, the local housing market is in the dumps. She was ... pleased with the commission."

The house was built into the hillside, with the top floor exposed all around but the bottom floor exposed only on the downhill side, opening onto a large deck that stuck out over the rapidly steepening hillside. Down below, through the trees, I could see a glint of sunlight on water.

"What's that?" I asked.

"The creek at the rear property line." Dad thought for a moment. "They told me the name of it, but I don't remember. Some Indian name. Dine maybe, or Ute. It's on the plat I got at the closing."

I carried boxes into the house and we took a couple of disassembled bedsteads and leaned them against the porch, but Dad and Mom jumped the majority of stuff from inside the truck to inside the house. We could've done without the truck entirely but that would've looked odd, a house full of furniture and other belongings, showing up as if by magic. We could hear the occasional car going by on the road above, but we'd nearly emptied the truck before one slowed and turned into the upper driveway with a quick double tap of the horn. I looked up and saw a woman climb out of a large SUV.

Mom came to the door. "The Realtor, I'll bet."

Mrs. Meriwether was a middle-aged, big-haired blonde wearing a full-length down-filled coat. A boy in a sheepskin jacket walked behind her, dragging his feet. He was carrying a large wicker hamper.

"My goodness, girl, aren't you cold?" the woman said.

I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt but I'd been in and out of the house. If she wanted cold I could take her to our other place. The temperature in the Yukon had been twenty below zero Fahrenheit that morning. Here, with the sun shining, it was fifty degrees warmer. Which, admittedly, was right at freezing, but it felt like spring to me.

Mom spoke from the porch. "Hello. Mrs. Meriwether, I presume?"

"And you must be Mrs. Ross."

I tried to keep my face still. That was the name we were using. I even had a nondriving state ID and a Social Security card with that name on it, but I wasn't used to it. "Call me Millie, please," said Mom. First names were the same. We'd agreed that it would be too confusing otherwise.

In fact, Dad said, "Introduce yourselves with first names only. Someone asks who you are, again, just the first name. They push for your last name, you'll have time to remember what it is now."

He put it like that. Don't think about who you're pretending to be. Don't think of it as a lie. Instead, think of it as who you are now.

"I'm Martha. I'm so glad to meet you. Did you have any trouble with the roads? The snows last week were just awful, but I guess the interstate must've been cleared." Almost as an afterthought she said, "This is Grant, my youngest. He's a freshman at Beckwourth High School-your new school." She turned to me. "Aren't you the spitting image of your mother, uh-"

I stuck out my hand. "I'm Cent, ma'am. Like a penny." I added the obligatory, "It's short for Millicent." If I didn't explain, they always asked.

"What nice manners. Very nice to meet you, Cent. Oh," she said, gesturing at the basket Grant was carrying. "This is for y'all. You can't have your kitchen set up yet. I hope you like chicken."

Grant helped me carry in the two bedsteads we'd left outside while Mom set the food out. He was slightly taller than me, but younger, I thought.

We took my bed around the outside, tromping through the snow, to get to the lower level, via the deck. Mom and Dad had the master suite, which was upstairs, as was the kitchen, formal dining room, and a formal living room. Downstairs were two more bedrooms opening onto a large family room.

"The pool table came with the house," I said as we took off our snow-packed boots just inside the sliding glass door to the deck.

"I know," said Grant.

Of course he knew. His mother was the Realtor after all. "You've been here?"

"Yeah. Naomi and I have been taking care of the grounds-sweeping the leaves off the deck and porch, keeping the weeds back from the house. It's been on the market for over two years." He looked toward the stairs. "If we finished early enough, we'd shoot some pool. Uh, I think Mom knew, but we didn't exactly discuss it."

"Got it. Who's Naomi?"

"Big sister. She's a senior at Beckwourth. Off to college next year."

"Only sister?"

"Yeah." We set the bedstead in my new bedroom, next to the box springs and mattress leaning against the wall.

"Are you a junior?" Grant asked.

"I don't know," I said.

"Huh?"

"I was homeschooled. We've been out of the country. I'll be taking placement tests before school starts up again."

Grant nodded. "Next Tuesday."

It was Thursday.

"The Gorgon," Grant added.

"Huh?"

"The guidance counselor. She'll be testing you. They call her Morgan the Gorgon."

"She turn somebody to stone?"

"Dr. Morgan does have this stare. But it's really the problem kids-the ones she sees for discipline problems. That's what they call her." He shrugged. "I got to test out of Algebra I so I like her."

Dr. Morgan had a sense of humor but it was very dry. My first hint was a brooch of Medusa's head dangling from Perseus' hand, like the famous statue in Florence.

The tests were computerized, given in the testing center, a small room lined with computers, connected to her office. She set me up for the science exam first, and twenty-eight minutes later I stuck my head back in her office.

"Did you have a question, Millicent? Sometimes those stupid computers act up-did it freeze?"

I shook my head. "No, ma'am. I'm finished."

"Dear, you have an hour and a half to take it. You don't need to give up so soon."

I raised my eyebrows. "Give up? I answered every question, then went back and double-checked my answers." Had I screwed up? Was I supposed to sit there for the whole time? I thought I was being careful as it was-I didn't want to make another stupid mistake like failing to take altitude into consideration.

Dr. Morgan rolled her chair over to her desk computer and moused through a couple of screens. "Oh."

"Did I do okay?"

Dr. Morgan cleared her throat. "Well enough. I'll set up the math assessment. Why don't you go get a drink of water and, if you need to, use the restroom?"

Mom had left me with the understanding that I'd be taking tests in the morning and afternoon, but when she showed up to take me to lunch, I was done.

I did have trouble with the history assessment. I was so worried about the math and science and language arts that I thought my general reading in history would be good enough.

We sat with Dr. Morgan and she analyzed my results. "I am not a fan of the state history requirement, but every state in the union does it and ours is no exception. You're very strong in science and math. I can put you in precalculus immediately and Biology II. We can definitely place you out of composition one and two. My thoughts are to bring you in as a junior. I could see an argument for bringing you in as a senior, but you're only just sixteen.... What do you think?"

She looked at me, not Mom.

Mom and I exchanged glances. We'd talked about this possibility. Softly, I said, "Sophomore, please."

Dr. Morgan's eyebrows lifted.

Mom spoke. "As you said, Dr. Morgan, Cent is only just sixteen. We've been out of the country most of her life but we've worked hard-she's worked hard-to make sure her academics are up to par. But she's..."

"Really unsocialized," I said.

Dr. Morgan laughed outright, then put her hand to her mouth. She said, "You seem quite mature, actually."

Mom smiled. "Well, yes-with adults. But she hasn't really had much interaction with teens or even children when she was younger. If we were just concerned about academics, we'd continue homeschooling."

I nodded firmly. "Right."