The dogs had torn through her sneakers years ago, but Texas was dry enough most days that Marcie never really needed them intact anyways. Today she sat perched in the lower branches of an oak tree, chewing through her fingernails like tough gristle.

The mosquitoes were circling like they always did in the late afternoon, in low angry clusters, swarming her face and ankles. Her denim jeans scarcely covered her knees, leaving the meat of her calves exposed to their wrath. Marcie did not think about this as she watched the rope below her twist, carrying in its knot the thick rubber of a worn out tyre.

She tried not to think of Sierra.

The name alone made something hot and sour curdle in the pit of her stomach.

She leant against the trunk and looked out over the lake then, laid out in front of her like green glass, bathed in a syrupy yellow light. She ran an ink stained hand through her choppy hair and tried to imagine what the pace would look like if it was colder, like it was up in Wisconsin: frozen over and blue-white, with kids skating across the lake like it was sewn into their skin, snow banks and snowmen lining the ice like sentinels. She’d definitely need proper shoes then, chunky snowboots with spikes on them.

She tried not to think of Sierra.

Her cousin, Grace, had said that up in Madison, women held hands all the time. Her friends: Sabre and Melanie, could kiss and hug and call each other babe and go ice skating and fall into each others arms in a laughing lump of tangled arms and legs, and no one would look twice.

Sierra had said the same thing about Austin.

She tried not to think about that now.

She thought about it anyways: the college campus both girls had only just allowed themselves to dream of, Sierra’s sweating dark hand enclosed in Marcie’s, nail polish chipping. The way the sun made the grass look unreal, too bright and plush like a fairytale. The way the jock in the quad had glared at them, and Marcie had brushed it off as nothing because this was Austin and her future and she was supposed to be free here.

The sound Sierra made when he broke her ribs. The way Marcie had just stood there. The way everyone had, and the world went still for a full minute, punctuated solely by Sierra’s gurgling blood and that guy’s wicked smile, and that word, that unrepeatable word that fell on Sierra like a knife and cut Marcie up anyways.

The sound of the sirens afterwards.

The way Sierra had never looked Marcie in the eye since.

The oak tree had been there since before Marcie was born. Her daddy had told her that once, back when he still told her things. He'd carved his initials into the bark when he was eleven, and if you knew where to look you could still find them, grown-over and stretched, like a pregnancy scar.

She climbed down when the light turned orange.

The walk back to the house was twenty minutes through scrub and dry grass that rasped against her bare calves. She'd done it so many times her feet knew it without her, navigating the exposed root systems and the place where the ground dipped suddenly near the old fence post, the rusted wire coiled at its base like a sleeping thing. Fireflies were starting up in the brush, blinking their cold green light.

Inside, her mama was at the stove. The television in the next room played to no one.

"You eat?" her mama said, without turning around.

"Not yet."

Her mama set a bowl on the counter, rice and something from a can that tasted like rust. Marcie ate standing up, because sitting felt like a commitment she didn't have the energy for. She looked at the back of her mama's neck, at the hair escaping its clip, and thought about saying something. She could not think what.

She went upstairs.

Her room was how she'd left it: the geography homework on the floor, the poster of the Spurs with the bottom corner curling away from the wall, the mess of charcoal pencils and the sketchbook she'd closed over three weeks ago and hadn't opened since. She sat on the bed and held her phone. She'd had Sierra's number blocked since July. She unblocked it twice a day sometimes, sat with the empty text field, and blocked it again.

She opened her sketchbook instead, for the first time in twenty-three days. The last thing she'd drawn was Sierra's hands, the left one, from memory: the particular way the knuckle of her ring finger sat higher than the rest, the hangnail she was always worrying at, the blue ink she always had somewhere on her palm from taking notes in that looping leftward script. Marcie had drawn it six times on the same page because she kept getting the proportions wrong, and the page was dense with hands now, a quiet crowd of them.

She turned to a clean page.

She put the charcoal to the paper and held it there and thought about Austin and the too-green grass and the sound the world made when it stopped. She thought about Grace, up in Madison right now probably, walking to a lecture in the cold with her backpack on, not thinking about anything in particular. Just walking.

She drew the oak tree. She drew it from memory, from the inside, looking out over the lake: the view she'd had for twenty years, the view she'd had this afternoon, the Spanish moss and the still water and the rope with the tyre. She drew it careful and slow, the way her art teacher Mr. Potts had taught her before he left for Houston. She made the lines deliberate. She made the water flat and wide.

She didn't put herself in it.

She lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling and listened to her mama moving around downstairs. Tomorrow was Monday. On Monday she would see Sierra in second period, sitting two rows over, and Sierra would look at the middle distance the way she did now, that particular careful nowhere that Marcie knew was because of her.

The ceiling fan ticked around.

Marcie closed her eyes and tried to want tomorrow.