It is bad enough to be embarrassed publicly, to suffer humiliation in front of one’s beloved. It is bad enough that the adult world remains mired with inconsistencies and complicated discussion, that the world outside Sissy Kischs fingertips is incongruous and unpredictable. But that she will also now have to commit the moment to memory—her utterance of love, followed by their snickering laughter—is nothing short of horrific. She only spoke a truth, and in doing so, she felt the wonder of lightness grow inside her. And then, from those she believed to be new friends—the glances from those girls, and Greg’s bemused expression—looks that said a defense or denial from Sissy would have been futile and would have rendered the point even more amusing.

She can no longer bear to dwell on the moment, and yet as she marches along the path, through the overgrown brush, as she pushes away the occasional low-slung branch that lashes at her, thin as a whip, she can do nothing but think on the moment. The path in the woods appears to her as a graveyard: a discarded buggy to her left, old newspapers, some empty water jugs long ago forgotten. Beyond the warm breeze that catches the leaves and tosses them like wishes, she hears— almost imperceptibly—the sound of her heart, still beating despite everything, still clinging to love because it is the heart that is assigned the burden of such a task. So often forsaken when it risks, when it favors not tomorrow or someday or once upon a time but the moment—the actual, unfolding moment—it is the task of the heart to uncover itself and break and mend. It is the task of the idiot heart to recover.

But now Sissy believes she will never recover. It is all too difficult, this process of growing up. Thinking on this, puzzled, she is a girl suddenly too proud for tears. Pollen drifts up from the disturbed branches. She sneezes, wipes her nose with the back of her hand. Smoke clings to her T-shirt and she is dizzy, the woods around her a twirl, a blur, a high spin. For the first time since she left the beach she realizes that not only is she brokenhearted but she is also terribly, ravenously hungry. She is so hungry she could snap a branch and gnaw on bark and pulp.

Still, no matter how hungry she is, no matter how thirsty she becomes, she vows not to go back to the beach and their smoke-screened laughter. She would rather be ravaged by wild boars. She would prefer to be lost in the forest than face the horrible, confusing repertoire of teens.

Just let them come and find her—she will be gone, just like Vicki, her best friend! (How mythic Vicki Anderson becomes in the light of memory, how reinvented.) Sissy will hide in the woods forever, and never go back. Thinking on this sweet victory, Eva and Greg suddenly regretting their selfishness, regretting the loss of Sissy Kisch, future performer, future ghost detective, keeper of a hundred dogs and cats, tamer of everything wild, she feels immensely satisfied. Emboldened, she lets out a barrage of curses that improves her stride and momentarily firms her resolve. But, when she hears a noise—the flurry of squirrels over leaves, the break of twigs—she stops, suddenly worried that Eva is correct—that their father may indeed be omnipresent, or that maybe a madman lurks by the water, waiting to grab her suddenly and make her scream. She looks around and tells herself: No one is here. No one will care. The fractured light pours down through the branches and the clouds dot the sky, a spattering of thumbprints.

She does not stop until she follows the path back toward the park, to the swimming hole that she and Vicki Anderson visited—empty today. She bends down, plucks some ferns and jack-in-the-pulpits that carpet the banks under willows. She finds berries that are bloodred, positively poisonous. She picks them anyway, careful not to squeeze so hard that juice stains her fingers. She takes all these things to the river’s edge, letting her feet sink into the mud as she releases them. She says an incantation, garbled but well intended.

She will never go back. She will journey onward, forever. She thinks: I am never, ever going home again.

“Fuck them all,” she whispers.

The thing that happens when you denounce the everyday world, the thing that happens when you deem everyone except yourself irritating, is that you are faced with the prospect of an incredibly lonely existence. Sitting on a limestone, Sissy listens to the birds that sing eerily overhead and to the rippling water that pools into rapids. The slanted light dances on the water, speckles it like a luminescent wing.

She pulls a thin branch from the overhanging limb, checking to see if it might support her weight. It snaps easily and falls into the water. Across the bank, the peeling birches form shapes of lids and dark chestnut-colored eyes. The knots lapse into uneven circles. The tall grass trembles.

If the everyday world fails her, there is still another under the water, a pulse of music, an ancient place that always beckons, a world not like her mother’s swirling ash, not like the gray moths that float into nothingness, but something else, a world Sissy is already creating for herself, a world she is already shaping into existence. Sissy closes her eyes, and there, on the facing bank, stands a majestic white horse, its harness adorned with a feathery plume. The horse whinnies and snorts before galloping off into the woods, between the thick trees. There on the facing bank, below the trees with their ropey vines, there in the tall grasses, she spots the shape of the golden, chatoyant eye. A lion rises and paces before bending its head over the river and lapping up water. It roars. A thrill moves through Sissy, electrifies her skin.

And there, again, Vicki Anderson appears from seemingly nowhere, thin and pale in the light, stranger and more ghostly but also perhaps more beautiful, an alabaster shape, a moving statue. It seems as though she has always been here, waiting for Sissy in the ferns, somewhere near the edge of the water. “You’re not dead,” Sissy says. “I didn’t want you to be dead, dead. I haven’t forgotten you.”

Vicki bends down and picks ferns and jack-in-the-pulpits, tossing them into the water. She pets the lion, running her hands through its fur. If it is a dream, if it is play the dream is still elusive. Sissy senses it might be pulled from her, easily, as one might pull a thread and unstitch a garment layer by layer, piece by piece. She wants to slip off the rock, swim over to the adjacent bank, and touch Vicki. But it is a growing knowledge that holds her here and keeps her hands planted firmly under her buttocks. If she moves, everything will be broken. If Sissy reaches Vicki, Vicki will disappear. Instead she tells her, quietly, the things she’s wanted to say, which is finally, mostly, only that she’s sorry—sorry about cutting her hair—it was an accident; the blade seemed to go down on itself and that was that—and sorry that she didn’t call to Vicki that day she saw her on her bike, heading down to the park. “Would it have made a difference at all?” she asks. “Would you have even turned around?” And she asks, finally, about God and if death really does or doesn’t exist and if heaven looks like Valley Forge, the way she always imagined. She wants so many answers, she is breathless. She wishes she had someone to talk to, someone who would talk back.

This is the way the story goes, Sissy thinks. Vicki Anderson walked through the forest. Vicki Anderson marched down the weedy paths to the river, sad because of a boy, sad because of her mother. She wanted to hurl herself into the cool water and let it take her in completely. She wanted to drown in the water. She heard a bird’s sound and turned to find a crow, fluttering its wings, hopping along a nearby branch. The crow had muddy eyes. She reached for it and it disappeared. She looked at herself in the water, her face rounded, her freckles gone. She dove into the water, but instead of sinking she floated, the force of the water lifting her until she floated above it, until she realized that she didn’t have arms anymore but wings. This is the way, Sissy decides, the story will go.

She sits quietly for an hour, composing a tale she can believe. She sits until she hears noises and sudden laughter: high-pitched, squealing laughter, and for the first time, she realizes that it has started to rain. “Sissy!” she hears in a chorus of voices. “Sissy Kiss,” she hears from Eva. Their tone not unkind. “Come on, Sissy Kiss,” she hears. “We’re coming to get you. We’re coming! We’re coming to take you home.”