Essential Maps for the Lost by Deb Caletti

pinches dead stuff off flowers. Her silence jabs him with shame. Her silence tells him what a bad, disappointing person he is. He just doesn’t get what she wants from him. The dock rocks as a boat passes, and he hears the clang of Glenn and his husband Craig’s sailboat. They have the biggest house on the dock, and it’s pitching and rocking. He doesn’t feel too well, all of a sudden. It’s anti-magic. He can feel an Ability Drain, levels turning to red.
    â€œBuzz?” Gran says.
    Shit! A Breath Weapon, Devil Chills, a Red Ache, Mind Fire. His stomach clutches up and his chest squeezes. Gran is right about him. What was he thinking? His mom is dead, and he’s going on some date?
    God, just like that, he’s sobbing like a baby. It comes out of nowhere, an invisible creature. He is felled, and he clutches his bony little gran and cries into her shirt, and it’s pathetic. You never know when these things will happen. One time, he was just brushing his teeth, looking at his frothy mouth in the mirror, when all of a sudden, bam. Grief clutched him in its fist, and he banged his head over and over and over into the bathroom wall. There’s a crater in the plaster still, like a meteor struck.
    â€œBuzz.” She sighs. “It’s okay. It is. You can be happy.” Now that she has what she wants from him, now that she’s dragged him down into feeling like shit, she changes her tune. Her voice is all soft and loving, yanking him back up again. He can see how Gran operates, but it doesn’t matter. You can understand a volcano, but it’ll still burn and bury you. You’ll still give it thanks if you’re not entirely destroyed.
    â€œI can’t.”
    â€œYou need to.”
    â€œA few months is all it’s been.”
    â€œSo much longer. Years. It’s been years .”
    Poor Ginger is losing it inside. She hates when people get upset. She’s scratching at the door and whining, and Gran lets her out. Ginger jumps around his legs. He feels her little toenails, trying to say It’s okay! I’m here! Dogs just give and give. No matter what’s happening in their own life, they look after you.
    He picks up Ginger. He gazes at her white shag rug face. “Stupid dog,” he says, but he means it with so much affection, his heart hurts. One thing he knows, he can love like you wouldn’t believe.

Chapter Nine
    Mads is lost. She realized that already, but now she is actually, literally lost. She got on the wrong freeway entrance and has ended up here, in some industrial graveyard. There are big warehouses and chain-link fences. There are huge, mysterious metal parts, the knuckles and knees of iron giants. An airplane swoops low and there’s a shuddering roar. She should never have turned off on that exit. Everyone gets confused down here. Night will fall by the time she finds the freeway again.
    She’s late. So late. See what trouble that boy has caused already? He distracted her like crazy, and now look. She pulls over into the parking lot of a huge, blank building labeled CTC. Anything could be going on in there. Mads’s phone won’t connect to the Internet. She hunts in Thomas’s glove box for a regular old map, but only finds a pair of winter gloves and a stack of Burger King napkins. Mads calls Suzanne. She tells her she’s having car trouble (true), that the truck has stopped (true) and that she’ll be right there (mostly true). Suzanne is pissed. People who are always late are the least understanding about you being late.
    Mads ventures back into the vast dystopian land of cranes and bridges and manufacturing. She chooses a street. To her new eyes, the sign says EUROPEAN PAINTINGS and not 1ST AVENUE SOUTH. She drives through DUTCH AND FLEMISH 17TH CENTURY and decides to turn down AMERICAN PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE ( S. SPOKANE STREET ), which leads her neatly to the freeway. A person needs a map, is