Nobody knew where the girl came from.

  She just… showed up one night — barefoot, bleeding slightly, with a buzzed-up pixie cut and eyes that looked like they’d already seen too much. She didn’t knock. Didn’t cry. Didn’t even introduce herself.

  She just sat on Peppa’s garage roof, staring at the moon like it owed her money.

  “Who the hell is that?” Alex asked, pointing with her spoon mid-breakfast.

  Peppa didn’t even look up from her toast. “That’s Bug.”

  “Bug?”

  “She told me her name’s Bug.”

  “Peppa,” said Mason slowly, “you can’t just name stray people.”

  “She told me, okay?!” Peppa snapped. “She said ‘Call me Bug’ and then fell asleep under the radiator.”

  “Creepy,” Alex muttered.

  “She ate half a can of baked beans with her hands,” Mason added. “Like, just—shloop.”

  Daisy sipped her black coffee from a cracked tarot-mug and smirked. “She’s got style.”

  “Daisy, you think your fox is your grandma.”

  “Because he is.”

  Everyone collectively decided to ignore that.

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  That afternoon, Marlene took one look at Bug from her porch and said, “Nope,” before hosing her off with cold water and slamming her door shut.

  Tanktop Tony said she gave him “bad vibes,” which was rich coming from a man who once arm-wrestled a feral pig behind the gas station.

  Even Twig — who was five years old and friends with two cactus skeletons — said, “I think she eats people,” before running away screaming.

  Bug didn’t seem to care.

  She stuck to the shadows. Watched everyone without blinking. Didn’t say much. Sometimes she hummed. Mostly she just sat beside Peppa like a gargoyle.

  “Why are you helping her?” Mason asked quietly one night.

  Peppa shrugged, cramming wires into an old radio like it had personally offended her. “Because I know that look.”

  “What look?”

  “The look like you’ve slept in a sink and seen something crawl out of someone else’s eye.”

  “Jesus.”

  Peppa glanced at him.

  “She’s not bad,” she said. “She’s just… lost.”

  Mason rubbed his temples. “She better not murder us.”

  “She won’t,” Peppa muttered. “I think.”

  That night, Peppa snuck into Daisy’s shack while the girl was passed out watching Ghoul School 5: Disco Detention and stole a mattress with minimal guilt.

  “Trade you this for five blank VHS tapes and a weird kid,” she whispered.

  The fox hissed. Deal accepted.

  She dragged it back to her garage, where Bug was sitting in the dark, peeling tape off her boots.

  “Got you a bed,” Peppa said.

  Bug looked up slowly. “Why?”

  Peppa blinked. “...Because I don’t have a couch?”

  Bug smirked slightly. It was the first time she’d smiled. Sort of.

  She borrowed some blankets from Marlene — well, “borrowed” as in took them off the line and yelled “IOU!” while running.

  “YOU LITTLE DEVIL!” Marlene screamed from her porch. “YOU’LL CATCH HELL FOR THIS!”

  Peppa just waved the blankets over her head like a parade float.

  Bug slept that night in the garage, curled up like a bomb that hadn’t gone off yet.

  And Peppa?

  She sat beside her, a half-finished machine whirring on the desk, eyes fixed on the darkness outside.

  She didn’t tell the others.

  She didn’t want to hear more whispers.

  Not yet.

  Because sometimes when someone looks like trouble, what they really are… is just scared.

  And nobody knew scared like Peppa did.