I remember, my grandmother used to call me doll, in her Southern accent, standing over me in those sun-soaked mornings at her house, when the light filtered through the pink cotton curtains and painted everything in rose, and the house smelt like cinnamon and oranges. I was sent there, after The Event, as I called it, nineteen with lanky legs and a chest too broad for my liking. She cut my hair, calling it a country hick mullet, and would not let me in the kitchen.

I do not believe she hated me.

She loved me, and she loved God, and the Devil was inside her, telling her it was inside me, wearing my father's old clothes, two sizes too big on my skinny frame. She called my glasses too feminine, and would not let me wear them, on my mother's orders. I called her on the landline the day I arrived, and then never again. It wasn't a pleasant conversation. When the sun rose, and she placed a home-cooked breakfast, bacon, eggs and grits, hashbrowns and a cup of coffee, all delicious, because it was Nana's cooking, and she still loved me, she told me she had applied for a job on my behalf.

I arrived at the lumber mill with the sun smearing my already failing retinas into bright puddles of light. The paper bag in my hand held a corned beef sandwich and an apple, a can of soda jostling around inside as if setting me up for certain embarrassment later in the day. A large man exited the mill, arms bursting with muscle, and he waved me over with all the authority of a cop. I trudged over.

"You the new hire?"

I nodded. "Name's El-"

"Elliot Hanson, I know 'ya. You Gertie's boy?"

I swallowed. "Grandson." The word slid past my lips like sandpaper.

"Well, I'm not sure what she was thinking. You ain't hauling shit with noodle arms like yours," he grasped my bicep suddenly, laughing all the while. "I'm Hank."

"Hi, Hank."

Hank sighed, and waved me inside. "Alright, son. I'll put you on some easy work for now. You'll be with Robin," he led me to a desk with a girl stood at it, bundling lumber into piles for shipment, and left me there.

"Hey, new blood. What's your name?" She asked, her strawberry blonde hair specked with sawdust. Her hands were calloused as they deftly wound a zip-tie around another bundle. It struck me suddenly that she may have been the prettiest girl I had ever seen.

I looked down as I said it, already fiddling with the plastic tail of a zip-tie. "Ella."

Robin chuckled lightly, and in that moment, since the event, all the soul I thought had drained out of me flew back to me.

"Ella, huh?"

"No, I-" I started, quietly tripping over my words. "El. El is fine."

Robin's eyes lingered a beat too long, long enough that I could feel sweat forming beneath the cotton of my two-sized too big shirt. "El, then." She flicked her chin at the pile beside her. "Grab that end."

I did as I was told. The lumber was rough under my palms, seams of bark still clinging in places, and the two of us hefted the plank onto the stack together. It wasn't heavy, not really, but my noodle arms strained anyway. Hank's words, already lodged somewhere behind my ribs, and as I was soon to learn, there would be many more words to come, sticking to much more painful places.

"You're stronger than you look," Robin said, and I couldn't tell if she meant it or if she was just being kind.

"Yeah, well. Been carrying suitcases my whole life," I said, and she laughed again, that same easy sound, like it cost her nothing.

We fell into a rhythm. She'd hand me the zip-ties, I'd feed them through, cinch them tight, and she'd stack. The sawdust hung gold in the light slanting through the high windows, and somewhere behind us a saw screamed through wood, and Hank's voice barked something at somebody else. It was loud, and hot, and my shirt, even with the collar gaping at my throat like a too-loose noose, stuck to my back within the hour.

"So," Robin said, not looking at me, focused on the next bundle. "Gertie's your grandma."

"Yeah."

"She's somethin'." Robin said it carefully, the way you'd test ice on a pond. "She come to church with my mama sometimes, Mavis Kennedy? Prays real loud."

I didn't answer that. I picked at the zip-tie tail instead, the plastic biting a thin red line into my thumb.

"You don't gotta talk about it," Robin said, softer now, and I felt her glance flick over to me and away, quick, like she was giving me room to breathe. "I just...you looked kinda far off, when Hank was talking. Like you were somewhere else."

"I was thinking about the corned beef sandwich in my bag," I lied, and she snorted.

"Liar."

"Yeah," I admitted. "Liar."

The whistle blew for break not long after, a shriek that cut through the saw-noise and sent men filing toward the shade of the loading dock. Robin wiped her hands on her jeans and jerked her head toward the door. "C'mon. You can eat that sad little sandwich next to me instead of alone."

I followed her out into the white heat of noon. She would later be the first person to give The Event a name. She called it dismemberment.

I had been working at that mill for over two weeks, gruelling work under the heat of summer, finally graduated from bundling lumber to cutting it. I felt guilty then, accepted into ranks of men, and abandoning Robin at her lone table, a strawberry-blonde beacon in a room of sweaty browns and greys. I came home ever day with the wail of the machinery in my head, saw hollering in my ears even as I pushed peas and potatoes around my china plate under Nana's gaze. She did not ask me much, outside of that polite small talk where she skated around any meaningful discussion. She asked about the mill, the machinery I'd learned to work, if any of the guys had invited me out.

I told her that they had not.

That much was true, but the guilt of the lie did not hit me until after dinner, one Wednesday night, when the wind was knocking at the windows, and she led me out to the front room. She grabbed me by my shoulders, and though it was tender, I had to shut my eyes to pretend it wasn't another arrestation. She pointed up, at a photo above the mantelpiece, I had seen every year in my childhood but never looked at. It was grandpa, who Nana called a good man, smiling his gap-tooth grin. In one hand he held his hunting rifle. The other, he rested on the stiffened, bristle-haired flank of a deer, rendered in black-and white. She sighed then, pulled back to look at me in my father's shirt, and said he would have taken you hunting, too. A man's rite of passage.

I invited Robin over that next evening, when Nana was out at her friend Barbara's. I had only once had a girl over before long before The Event, when I had stuffed my wooden-plank body into boxers and basketball shorts, and stuffed that body into the waiting pockets of blonde-haired mirror images, all the while hoping that sweat through osmosis would act like an alchemist's solution. I had not once withdrawn feeling satisfied, and I was certain that both Emma May and Jenny Walters had faked it for my benefit, wailing like cicadas in the night, with none of the shed skin to show for it.

Robin arrived at my doorstep in jeans and a flannel, shirt stained and hair pinned back by a thin, yellow Alice band. I had greeted her in my aunt's old jeans, and again, my father's too-big shirt, because I felt that I would be best not to overdo anything. I welcomed her in with a shaking hand, and fixed her a tall glass of sweet tea as she sat on my Nana's couch. The air smelt like oranges, and was stagnant as swamp water. She did not expect it, and that was the first shock. I had told her, in confidence of the heat blanketing us under the static TV spitting out evangelical nonsense and infomercials intermittently that she worked with so many guys, and no one had looked at her twice? She replied they think I'm bulldyke, and that was that. I did not ask are you, for fear of breaking the spell, the way she said it at speaking volume, as if it was not to be hidden, and for the first time in my short life, I wondered if the word could ever be spoken like that.

She asked again, if I wanted to talk about it. The Event hung above us both, marking this stranger with its searing intensity as it held me, and she waited, sweet tea sweating on the table in front of us. I told her honestly, and at that, she placed her lips onto mine. It was only an hour later when we lay across my Nana's couch that it hit me that, yes she was, and the answer was still clinging to my skin and hers. My eyes were blurry from joy and from my failing eyes, and I told her when she went to shower about the glasses atop the medicine cabinet, she returned minutes later, back in her torn flannel, pressing the arms against my ears, through my hair, and clarity overcame me.

She looked at me with her cheeks flushed the same shade as her hair, and I could almost count the freckles dotting her face, as she ran her fingers across my collarbone. I wanted to flinch at the action, but she flinched first, looking at the clock, saying that her mama would want her home. She did not ask about mine. She understood too, that dismemberment meant that both parts were severed, and would not meet again.

I learnt that Robin did not return home to a peaceful house that night in the morning. She had showed up in a leather jacket too thick for the sweaty air of the mill, sleeves pulled right up the way that Hank would've banned if she were working any of the machines. Get sucked right into that blade, you would, he'd say, pointing out another man on the production line with a missing finger as proof. I met her on lunch, and she held out an ice-cold can of soda to me, in a way that I could see her sleeve ride up. At the base of her hand, where her wrist began, sat a red ring, angry and glossy, like a cigarette burn.

She caught me staring immediately. "My Ma."

I felt my mouth dry up. "Your Ma?"

She shrugged. "Missed curfew."

"Robin, I'm so sorry, I-"

She held up a hand to silence me. "Not your fault. She would've found another excuse if it wasn't curfew." She shouldered off the jacket then, revealing her upper back, scarcely hidden by her spaghetti strap top. The pale flesh was marked by an intricate spider web of scars, some thick, some thin, all greying shades of pink, a massive constellation that I hadn't noticed when I had my hands all over her last night. "Go on," she said. "You can touch it."

I did, reaching my too-fat fingers out to run them across the lines, expecting to find raised lines like a manuscript of Braille, lash-marks, angry and throbbing. I only found smooth skin.

"Yeah, I scrub the hell out of it every night. Stops the scars from forming proper." Her voice was casual, so casual that it hurt something deep inside of me.

"Robin, I-"

"Ella," she said, and the two syllables felt foreign when addressed to me, so much that I blinked back at her before she extended a hand and motioned me to sit beside her. "El."

I sat, and she snorted. "Don't pretend you've got it any better."

"My folks might not...they don't...I don't have scars like that, Robin."

"Yeah, well, you ain't bulldyke," she said, and the word landed again, like a stone in my gut. "Or are you?" She turned to me with one eyebrow raised.

My stomach turned. "Robin--"

She smiled. "Only joking."

She got me into her car after work ended, both of us bundled into the front of her breaking down truck. She helped me climb onto the hood, citing my noodle arms as reason for such womanly chivalry, and finally made me smile at the words, which I appreciated more than anything. We pitched up at the creek on the edge of town, a small wooden footbridge laying in the distance, like something out of a kid's book. She kicked off her sneakers, shaking sawdust from them, and rolled up her jeans. For once, I didn't mind the mosquitoes biting at the thick meat of my calves, though I knew I would soon, when the wounds became rubbed raw and bloody, agitated by the sweat tracking through them under the heat of the mill tomorrow morning.

Then, she reached into her bag, and produced another set of squashed sandwiches, and a long log of cake.

"Ma made too much again," Robin said, by way of explanation. "She does that when she's feeling guilty."

She unwrapped the sandwiches, wax paper crinkling, and handed me the fatter of the two. I peeled back the bread to reveal ham and something orange that might've been cheese. I ate it anyway. It was better than my own soggy corned beef had been in weeks, going warm in its paper bag under the truck seat.

"You doing alright?" She asked.

I picked a piece of crust off instead of answering right away. The creek moved past below us, carrying a leaf that was too yellow for July, and somewhere further down the bank a bullfrog hummed its mating call.

"I keep waiting for something to go wrong," I admitted finally. "Been two weeks and nothing's gone wrong yet. Nana hasn't said anything. Hank hasn't said anything. You--You didn't make it weird. After last night. Most people would've made it weird."

Robin snorted, wiping a crumb off her chin with the back of her hand. "Nice of you to point it out." She broke off a piece of cake, then broke off a bigger piece and handed it over. "Besides. Waiting for the bad thing don't stop it coming. Just means you don't get to enjoy the sandwich while you got it." She grinned, sawdust still caught somewhere in the part of her hair, copper in the late light. "Y'know your problem, El?"

"I'm sure you'll tell me at some point." I lay back beside her, laying my head on her chest. "Just not today, okay?" The smiled softly in response, the metal of the hood ticking as it cooled, her shoulder warm against mine, and for twenty minutes she sat beside me, humming softly.

Then, after a long, sweet while, she pointed out at the water, and said: "Wanna go in?" and didn't wait for an answer.

Almost immediately, she was waist deep in the water, me wading in afterwards. She splashed me, and I smiled, splashing her back and receiving a much louder shriek. Laughing, she cussed me out, peeling the shirt from her torso in one swift motion. The sight of her then almost made me keel over, the flesh blooming where mine did not, and I stilled there in my t-shirt, soaked, and clinging to my wooden-plank shoulders. Her smile didn't drop.

She ran back to her car and held out a bikini top, pink and white striped, the kind of thing I assumed she wouldn't be caught dead wearing. She held it out in question.

"Why do you have that?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Emergency change of clothes. My car's a piece of junk, and the roads out here are long."

She tossed it to me anyways.

The first time the phone rang, I picked it up, while Nana was distracted in the kitchen door closed. I would have regretted this choice a lot more if the person on the other end of the line had been anyone other than Rosanna. I stood there, hair still wet, with the marks of Robin’s gift still impressed across my hips and chest. I could feel my hands getting sweatier as the handset started slipping through my fingers as her voice echoed down the line, quiet and small, and threaded with an unmistakable wobble as she tried to hold back her tears.

"El?"

I held my breath. "Hi, Rosie."

"When are you coming home? Dad said--"

"I'll be home by the time school starts, Ro." I didn’t know that was a lie yet, but I strongly suspected it would be, and I tried to keep my voice even as it came from my mouth.

"But that's not fair! I wanna spend summer with you!"

"I know," I said, rolling the fabric of my shirt collar between my sweating fingers.

"What did you do? They said you...um...messed up." Her words caught on her self imposed childish censorship, as if the crime of quoting her elders was anywhere near as bad as the transgression she had already committed by dialing Nana’s number. “How’s Nana?”

“She’s good. She’s gardening.”

“Isn’t it dark out?” Rosanna asked, and I could almost see her, head tilted like a curious puppy, and the image of her appeared in my head like some holy vision: her small face peppered with freckles, teeth missing, hair long and smooth. My heart sank.

“Yeah. Yeah, it is, but she’s got one of those lanterns, Ro. Like an old timey princess.”

She smiled down the line, the curve of her mouth audible from miles away.

“I’ve uh…I’ve got a job. It’s at a mill," I continued.

“Like a windmill?”

“Not really. It makes wood and stuff. For building.”

“Are you gonna build me something?”

”Yeah,” I said, mostly to hear her tone brighten again. “I’ll build you something. A birdhouse.”

The line went quiet for a second. "Can it be blue?"

"Can what be blue?"

"The birdhouse. Blue's my favorite now. Not pink anymore." She said it like a confession.

"Blue's a good colour," I said. "Blue's a great colour."

"Dad says pink is a girl colour and blue is a boy colour but I don't believe him because Aunt Cheryl's car is blue and she's not a boy, so I don't know why birds would care."

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth to muffle the sound that fell out of me. "Yeah," I managed. "Birds don't care much about that stuff."

"Are you gonna paint your room blue too? When you come back?"

I closed my eyes. Somewhere behind me I could hear Nana's trowel scraping against the flowerbed border, a rhythmic little sound, and I understood with a lurch that she'd hear every word of this if I wasn't careful, that the kitchen door was only a door and not a wall.

"I don't know if I'm coming back to that room, Ro," I said, voice dropping several decibels.

"Why not?" She whispered back.

That's the thing about little siblings that I hate. They know more than they say. They absorb things like a sponge, like an old oak never grows back a branch it had clipped as a sapling.

"It's complicated, bug."

"That's what Dad says too. He says it's complicated and then he doesn't say anything else, and Mom just goes and does the dishes even though they're already clean." She paused then, and I thought I could hear the toe of her shoes scraping the floor. "Did you do something bad?"

She asked with no accusation in it at all. If she'd asked cruelly I could've hated her for it, just for a second, just enough to make it easier. Instead I had to stand there in Nana's front hall with the phone cord wound twice around my wrist, stumbling over a half-baked answer.

"No," I said. "I didn't do anything bad. I just...made Dad angry. But it's not his fault. He'll realise eventually. I'm just not who he thought I was."

"Ok. I still wanna see you though. Even if Dad's mad at you."

"I know, Rosie. I want to see you too." I heard the back door creak, and my pulse kicked up like a rabbit startled from a hedge. "Hey, I gotta go, okay? Nana's coming in."

"Wait--"

"I'll call you soon. I promise."

"Okay. I miss you being loud in the house. It's too quiet now."

I didn't have anything to say to that. I said I missed her too, and I did, more than the words could carry, and then I put the phone back in its cradle just as the screen door swung open and Nana stepped through with dirt on her knees and a fistful of cut zinnias, orange and red, the color of the sun going down.

"Who was that?" she asked, not looking up as she shook the dirt from the stems into the sink.

"Wrong number," I said.

She hummed, noncommittal, as I stood there a moment longer with my hand still resting on the phone, feeling the last warmth of the receiver fade under my palm. The wind blew open the curtains, and through the crack between them, the sky was turning a dark, bruised blue.

I went upstairs that night with a knot sat deep in my belly like an anchor that had not yet dropped to its deepest point: and I dreaded the point where it would plunge even further. My denim clad legs swayed on the stair, all the way to the bed where they curled under me like the wonky limbs of a bird. My glasses had been returned to Nana's medicine cabinet, so the sky beyond the plain brown curtains was an indigo-blue smear, smattered with white lights and the blinking green light of a jet engine.

I lay back on the bed like a creaking marionette, legs extending stiffly, arms laid across chest like a corpse. I kept my head propped up on the worn pillows, exhaling one long breath, but never really letting my shoulders drop. Dinner sat in my belly, the savory taste of potatoes and sausage curdling in my mouth like lemons in milk. I did not know why Rosie’s call had shaken me so much: or worse, I did, and avoiding it on a cellular level.

There was a sound outside like thunder, and I lifted myself off the comforter and turned towards my open window. Warm air still emanated from the crack, laced with the cold ribbons of rainwater falling from on high. The sky flashed, and the old apple tree in Nana’s yard swayed violently. The dog from two doors down howled, Barley, a young golden retriever, eager and yappy.

Then, without better reason, I slipped out of the open window and seated myself on the small sliver of roof beneath it. The shingles were slick beneath me, but my jeans were heavy and did not slide, and the rain hit my face like holy water. The knot in my stomach almost loosened as I tilted my head back up towards the navy blue smear above me, sprinkled with stars and falling tears. I imagined Robin’s head set against my shoulder, and for five sacred minutes, I was awash with joy.

When I opened my eyes to another crack of thunder, all the yard was alight.

The dry spell’s curse upon a spark was not thwarted by a small shower: the fire spread all the same, creeping down the old tree like a great orange caterpillar, reaching its many fingered hand towards the grass and extending in countless directions. The sudden whoosh of heat reached me even as I sat on the roof, and sense overcame me all at once.

I closed my eyes and jumped. Not into the fire, I was not at that time looking to die, but to escape, to scramble away from the alley behind the fence where that small patch of roof deposited me. I had thought about it before, sneaking out like this, but found myself paralyzed by guilt or fear I could not say. I found my sneakers insufficient for the impact, canvas tearing on the dirt path as I ran and felt the ache of my legs moving alongside the shockingly intense ache of freedom all at once.

It is an odd feeling to find nothing tethers you when you leave it, part from disbelief, from joy, from the eternal self-hatred that stems from the realisation that you could have done this sooner, and it wouldn’t have mattered all the same. I ran until I got to the lumber mill, fire firmly behind me, and maybe an hour until anyone found out.

I paused for a second. Nana didn’t deserve to die, devoid of grandchild and comfort, I thought. The grief of what I had done rocked me to my core then, so much so that I sank to my knees right there, in front of the shitty vending machine, praying to backlit rows of stale Lay’s and flat sodas. Somewhere behind me, nature raged on, birds’ calls and jackal screams, mating calls and warning calls to the colony all the same, melting into one great soundscape as images of Nana burning up flooded my mind like a holy vision.

A sound stirred me from my sacrilegious rumination, softer than animal and rougher than human. Robin, enrobed in the half-primal state of sleep and a torn up sleeping bag, huddled in the small office of the mill. Under the desk, she looked almost like those photos from the 1950s, of schoolchildren sheltering from bombs overhead. I called out to her and rocked her softly.

She did not respond.

I began to wonder if she had ever been anything but a dream this whole time.

My fingers had barely grazed Robin's cheek, gliding across the soft skin of her cheek like the hull of a boat cuts through a wave, when I thought I heard her breathe. A single strand of strawberry blonde hair tickled her face. I left her curled up in the sleeping bag, green and fleece-lined like a giant chrysalis. I sat back on my heels and let the office swallow me whole, cinderblock and diesel and the tang of sawdust gone stale in the heat. Somewhere beyond the walls, sirens finally found their voice, thin and far off, chasing a fire that had already had its first full meal. I did not go to them. I could not make my legs carry me back toward the orange light crowning the trees, not yet, not while Robin lay there like something washed up by a tide only I could see.

"Robin." I said it again, quieter this time, like a question I was afraid to have answered wrong.

Her eyes opened slow, gum-stuck with sleep, and for a second she looked at me like I was a stranger standing in her doorway with a knife. Then something in her face softened, folded back into itself, and she pushed up onto one elbow.

"El?" Her voice cracked down the middle. "What time is it? What's that smell?"

"Smoke," I said, and even saying it out loud made my chest go tight, the word carrying weight enough to crush a rib. "Nana's house. There was a storm, and the tree, and I don't--I don't know if she got out."

Robin was on her feet before I finished the sentence, sleeping bag pooling at her ankles like a shed skin. She didn't ask why I was here instead of there. She didn't ask why my sneakers were torn through at the toe, or why my hands shook the way old men's hands shake, loose and useless at my sides. She just took my face in both her palms, sawdust and salt and the ghost of algae still on her skin from the creek, and made me look at her.

"Hey. Hey, look at me. We're gonna call it in, and we're gonna go, and whatever's there, we're gonna deal with it. You hear me?"

I nodded, though I didn't believe a word of it.

She found Hank's office phone still plugged into the wall behind a stack of invoices, dialed with fingers that trembled only slightly more than mine, and gave the dispatcher the address in a voice gone flat and businesslike. When she hung up she didn't let go of my hand. She laced her fingers through mine instead, calloused palm against my too-soft one, and pulled me toward the door.

"Truck's out front," she said.

The night had gone strange and orange at the edges, the rain finally slacking to a drizzle that did nothing against the blaze eating its way through Nana's yard. We drove with the windows down, ash drifting in like grey snow that didn't belong to any season, and I watched it settle on my knuckles and thought, absurdly, of Rosie asking if the birdhouse could be blue, as we sailed far past Nana's house, the ghost of the flames and the mill, and onto the open road beyond us.

We drove for near an hour before Robin's truck made a sputtering sound that sounded enough like a death rattle to worry the both of us. She pulled off at a gas station sitting alone on the shoulder of the highway, its sign flickering between GAS and REST STOP so that it read half of both, over and over, GA, STOP, like it couldn't decide which one it wanted to be. The lot was empty save for a rusted ice machine humming to itself and a moth-eaten dog asleep under the propane cage. Robin cut the engine and just sat there a second, both hands still on the wheel, knuckles pale under the sodium light.

"You need gas or you need a minute?" I asked.

"Bit of both." She let out a breath, then pushed open her door. "C'mon. I'll buy you something."

The scent of Febreeze waging a losing battle against the burnt coffee and motor oil hit me in that artificial cleaner way I hadn't quite smelled since leaving Atlanta, the false fresh linen smell dragging me back through years of high-school hallways and changing room jury stands. The woman behind the counter glanced up from a paperback and gave us a once-over that clocked the ash still dusted into my hairline and the state of my torn sneakers. She did not comment on either. Small mercies.

Robin grabbed two waters and a bag of gas station kolaches from the warmer, and set them on the counter alongside a pack of Marlboros.

"Rough night?" the woman asked, ringing it up.

"Something like that," Robin said, and didn't elaborate, and the woman didn't comment, just handed back change and told us to drive safe, like a stock phrase out of a piece of shit Halloween decoration.

We sat outside on the curb by the propane cage, the dog stirring long enough to sniff at my ankle before deciding I wasn't worth the effort. Robin lit her cigarette on the third try, cupping her hand around her cracked Bic's flame, and passed it to me without asking if I smoked. I didn't. I took a drag anyway and coughed hard that tears sprung to my eyes, and every part of my throat burned.

"You didn't have to come with me," I said, once I had caught my breath between choked hiccups.

"I did." She took the cigarette back, studied the cherry of it like I had turned over my father's gun in my hands all those years ago, and realised that to her, the burning nub was a weapon all the same. "Besides. Where else was I gonna sleep tonight?"

I didn't say anything, but she answered anyways.

"It's better than home." The neon sign buzzed above us, GA, STOP, GA, STOP, and somewhere out past the treeline a siren finally gave up and went quiet, its work done or abandoned.

I unwrapped a kolache. "I keep thinking about Rosie."

"Yeah?"

"I told her I'd build her a birdhouse." I looked down at my palms, ash-grey under the streetlight, my nails torn ragged from the fence I'd scrambled over. "Feels like a stupid thing to be thinking about right now."

"It's not stupid." Robin knocked her shoulder against mine. "You miss her." She stubbed the cigarette out against the curb and flicked it into the gravel. "You're gonna see her again."

I wanted to believe her the way I did when she phoned 911, believeing in the woman twice her age living behind her eyes for just long enough to get us through. I nodded instead of answering, because my throat had gone tight again, and this time it wasn't the cigarette's fault. She stood, brushed the gravel dust from the seat of her jeans, and held a hand down to pull me up. "Truck's got maybe half a tank now. We'll get further this time."

Georgia let go of us somewhere past Toccoa, the pines thinning into low hills that rolled up into the Carolinas like a long, green-grey exhale. I watched the state line sign flick past in the dark, reflective letters catching Robin's headlights for half a second before the black swallowed it again, and I felt something in my chest ease loos. We didn't say anything about it. She just reached over without looking and turned the radio dial until she found a station that wasn't all static and preaching, and left her hand resting on the bench seat between us, palm up, an invitation I took without hesitation

The kolaches were long gone by the time the fuel light blinked on again outside Spartanburg, and Robin's shoulders had started that particular slump that meant she was running on fumes same as the truck. I offered to drive. She laughed at that, and said she wasn't about to hand over the wheel of her one worldly possession to my noodle arms with a learner's permit two years expired. Somewhere around one in the morning, with the sky gone that flat, starless black, she pulled off at a motel called the Bluebird Inn, its sign missing the D so that it read BLUEBIR INN in tired pink neon, one bulb stuttering, like a distant cousin to the rest stop.

The woman at the desk took Robin's cash wordlessly, counted out chang, and slid a brass key across the counter attached to a plastic tag shaped like a duck.

"Ice machine's broke," she said, by way of goodnight, and went back to her television.

Room 6 was almost glamourous to Robin and I, bigger than truck-bed at least, and that was enough. There were two double beds with matching floral spreads, orange and brown flowers that had probably been fashionable sometime around Nana's wedding, and a television bolted to the dresser with a coat hanger doing the job a proper antenna should have. Robin dropped her bag at the foot of the far bed and sat down hard.

"We made it," she said.

"Halfway, maybe." I sat on the other bed, the springs complaining under me, and looked at my own hands in the lamplight. There was ash still worked into the creases of my knuckles, grey lines like the beginnings of a map sketched in hraphite. "You said DC. Why DC?"

"Cousin of mine's up there." She peeled her boots off one at a time, letting them thud to the carpet. "You got somewhere better?"

I didn't. I had a birdhouse I'd promised to build and no return address to send it to, and beyond that, nothing that could rightly be called a plan.

"No," I admitted. "DC's fine. DC's good."

She smiled at that, and reached over to switch off the lamp between us. In the dark the air conditioner kept up its complaint, and I lay there listening to Robin's breathing even out beside me, feeling the day settle into my bones like sediment. I thought of Nana's house, whether it still stood or whether it had gone the way of the tree, whether she'd gotten out in time, whether she'd even tried the way I hadn't stayed to find out.

I thought of Rosie's voice asking if the birdhouse could be blue.

"You awake?" Robin's voice came soft through the dark, barely there over the rattle of the AC.

"Yeah."

"We're gonna be okay." She didn't reach for my hand this time. "I've done this before. It gets easier once you stop looking back at the thing you left."

I didn't answer her. I lay there instead and watched the stuttering pink light from the sign outside bleed faintly through the gap in the curtains, painting the popcorn ceiling in slow pulses, on and off, on and off, like an off-kilter heartbeat. Eventually the light didn't matter anymore, because I'd stopped seeing it, sleep pulling me under the way the creek water had pulled at my ankles that day that felt now like it belonged to some other, earlier version of myself.