nside the farmhouse, I gave Amber the last of my precious juice boxes in the hopes of sobering her up.

“Ever since I saw you at the fish tank,” she said with a slurp, “I keep seeing these little movements out of the corner of my eye, but when I turn to look there’s nothing there.”

“It’s the faeries,” I told her.

“It’s not the faeries,” she snapped back. “It’s some sort of psychological manifestation of stress because I’m stressed.”

“Like you have anything to be stressed about, Ms. Perfect,” I muttered.

“Um, hello?” And hello teenage attitude. “I’m stressed because my dad should not be with your mom, Enid. Your mom’s nice and all, but she’s —” Amber snorted, and I knew what was coming “— strange.”

“Clever,” I lied.

“And my parents are meant to be together,” Amber continued. “They have this amazing, overarching love story.”

“You told me they’re always breaking up. You said you were living with your mom and her boyfriend before you moved here.”

“Exactly.” Amber threw her arms in the air as if I’d made her point for her. “Every love story has obstacles that seem insurmountable, but that’s an illusion. For true love, all obstacles can be mounted. Just like Romeo and Juliet.”

“Who die at the end of their play?” Amber didn’t have the monopoly on teenage attitude.

“You’re right, Enid,” Amber gasped. “That could happen to them.”

“Which them?”

“My father and Margery! Keep up, Enid. They could be so happy together,” Amber wailed. “Significantly happy together. Meaningfully happy.”

“But dead?” Amber’s inebriated thought processes were proving rather opaque.

“Happiness,” Amber continued without choosing to acknowledge me, “isn’t the act of being happy. It’s the act of doing happy, it’s the act of acting on happy versus acting from happy.”

I had no response to this, mainly because it sounded like nonsense similar to the self-help books patients’ relatives were always giving my mother (You deserve happiness. Put it out to the universe. Etc.) Amber hadn’t seemed the type to fall prey to such banalities, but here she was, spouting them off.

“And what is most important,” Amber went on, “is that I am not happy. I have a very intense sixteen-year plan with no room for not happiness. I have to go to school to get all the degrees and medical school and graduate school and clinical placements and fellowships and all the papers I have to write to make sure everyone is paying attention to me because I am so smart about all this —” she flapped her hands “— psychiatric brain psychology stuff.”

“That sounds like a lot of work.” There was no way to say that without a teeny bit of sarcasm creeping in, which, thankfully, Amber did not notice.

“It is, and see, you saw, right.” Amber wagged a finger at me. “No room for not being happy.” She then flinched as if she’d spotted something moving in her periphery.

“You don’t have to worry,” I told her. “There are no faeries in here.” I’d brought Amber to the farmhouse for that reason. “It’s probably only a mouse,” I said, forcibly suppressing all that I knew about hantaviruses.

But Amber had switched from detailing her n-step plan to full-on sobbing. “See,” she cried. “Psychological manifestations of stress. I’m having a psychotic break.”

I was fairly certain that all Amber had was a case of alcohol mixed with having spent too much time flipping through the pages of her father’s DSM-5, but that seemed far too snarky, even for me, to say to someone so clearly distressed. I attempted conciliatory tones instead.

“It isn’t like I want our parents to be together, either,” I reiterated. “I mean, my mother and your dad.”

“You don’t?” Amber looked up at me, wiping tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand.

“No, I don’t. I want them to break up.”

“Why would you want that?” Amber demanded. “My father not good enough for your mother?”

Trust Amber to get offended about me having the same aversion to our parents being together as she had; now I had to placate her to get us out of this spat. “Everyone is good enough for everyone,” I said, hoping that would be enough to mollify her. “But I don’t want them to be together, just like you don’t want them to be together. I’ve said so at least fifty times since you got here.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Yes, I have.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Yes, I have.” I’d end this toddler-style debate. “I was even working on a plan to break them up when you tripped over my cord.” And ruined my beautiful plan by uprooting the tree at the edge of the road, I added to myself.

Uprooted the tree.

Like the trees outside our house in town.

Hmmm. If I wanted my mother and Dr. Holden broken up, I could only assume that the faeries wanted the opposite and were willing to do whatever they could to ensure that their lovebirds’ canoodling was not interrupted. Like destroying my set-up. Like getting Amber Holden out of the way, since she opposed their coupledom as much as I did. And while faeries couldn’t uproot trees themselves, they could manipulate events and overstressed teenagers so that trees got uprooted.

“I’m tired,” Amber announced suddenly, rolling onto her back. “Maybe I’ll take a nap.”

“No, you don’t.” I shoved her onto her side and positioned her arms and legs in the recovery position, familiar with this trick from pamphlets I’d read during my many stays on the bench outside of Mrs. Estabrooks’s office.

“Everything is ruined,” Amber moaned. “Enid, help me.”

“I don’t need to help you. You’ll be fine once you sober up.”

“You think so?” She tossed her hand around in my general direction, as if trying to locate me precisely. “You’re all right, Enid. I’m going to tell Thomas that.”

“Who?”

“Our father.” Amber laughed. “Maybe you can call him Tom to be different. Margery’s not bad either,” she non-sequitured. “I’m sorry I called her stupid to her face yesterday.”

I would have expected a more sesquipedalian critique than stupid from Amber, but no matter. “When did you see my mother?” I asked.

“I went over to your house after the power came back on.”

“How was my mother?” I asked. “Did she seem frazzled? Was the house overflowing with the Missing Child posters she’d printed out at the copy shop?” My mother’s state of mind had nothing to do with whether Amber had drawn the faeries here or had been drawn here by them, but I couldn’t stop myself from asking.

“She was like she always is,” Amber said, not at all the answer I wanted. Why hadn’t my mother realized I was missing by now? We were so in sync that I’d noticed right away that she’d been acting strange even before she dragged Dr. Holden into our lives. Shouldn’t familial concern be reflexive? Shouldn’t she be worried about me?

Enough of all this. “Why’d you come here?” I asked Amber directly.

“I started walking,” she said slowly, “nowhere in particular after I left the liquor store. It was … these lights just kept pulling me forward, and I just kept following them. More neurological symptoms.” She slumped further onto the floor. “I’m so sad.”

I knew that already. “How big were the lights that you followed?” I asked. “Firefly sized?”

“Bigger.”

I nodded. “Will-o’-the-wisps,” I said to myself.

“The hospital is in the other direction.”

“The other type of will-o’-the-wisp. The type that’s faerie magic.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Enid. Stop being weird.”

But I’d had it with Amber’s obtuseness and put-downs. “You do too know what will-o’-the-wisps are,” I snapped. “Balls of light that draw people along by staying just out of reach.” Amber, in her state, was ideal for being tricked by will-o’-the-wisps to take down the tree, and even if Amber had left the tree alone, her presence would divert my attention away from the field, where the faeries could then wreak their havoc.

Amber snorted.

“No one asked your opinion,” I said, not that Amber could have had an opinion on my private thoughts. But then why had she snorted at what I had thought? Had the faeries somehow equipped Amber Holden with the ability to read my mind during her will-o’-the-wisp walk? If they had, tinfoil hats aside, I’d have no recourse. The faeries would have won almost before I’d even begun to fight. Calmly, the way one moves around a carnivorous animal with large, pointy teeth, I turned towards Amber.

Who was snorting in her dreams: I’d been quiet long enough that Amber Holden had achieved her goal of falling asleep.

I draped my sleeping bag across her. After putting my water bottle and generic Ibuprofen next to Amber’s head (just like on TV when the main character has had too much to drink), I slowly stood up to creep past. Then I slowly crouched back down to move my water bottle further away in case Amber, rolling around, knocked it over and got my sleeping bag wet. I did not want to get into a wet sleeping bag later, after I’d returned from town, where I was off to because, if the faeries could send someone out here to ruin my plan, I could just as easily send someone into town to ruin theirs: me.