Ellen climbed down and looked behind her at the path she’d cut through the grass and screamed, jumping back. Thomas and I came over. It was a nest of baby rabbits. Parts of them were dispersed across the gold stubble of the field. We all stood, horrified. Ellen turned white with shock. I’d always seen her as being tougher than me, more abrasive and thicker-skinned. After hitting the rabbits, she was wounded. Even days later, she swears to me she wasn’t thinking about it or remembering it, but her body would still have that feeling, and when she would try to think what it was, what was wrong, she would remember.

After Dad died, I knew that feeling, too, how sadness could be in your body even when it wasn’t in your head. Maybe that’s why she didn’t work with us as much after that. I was saddened by the rabbits and really sad for the weight on Ellen for what she thought she’d done, but I reacted differently than she did. More detached. The same with the deer the night before. I was sad that it had happened but not distraught. Maybe that was the difference—when you were the cause of the catastrophe. Maybe if it had been me sitting on the Gravely or driving Grady’s Mercedes, I would have been devastated.

Inside the Kingdom, I pulled an oak leaf and lay on my back, stretching my legs against its trunk. I had bruises on my right shin and raw scratched mosquito bites. I held the leaf toward the light. Red oak. Its underside is a paler green. Toothed lobes, slender stalk, and very fine tufts of hair along the midrib. Its leaves can grow ten inches long and seven inches wide. The bark of the red oak looks like it has bright shiny silver stripes running down it. It was the most common tree in this part of the woods. Ancient cultures believed that the oak was sacred, and they interpreted the messages of Zeus and other gods through the rustling of the oak’s leaves. Suddenly nearby I heard a rumbling. I dropped the leaf and listened. I knew it was Wilson McVay.

I lowered my legs and rolled onto my stomach, keeping my head down. The motorcycle downshifted, slowed, the throttle dropping. It stopped.

“Hello?”

I kept my face down in the soft moss and didn’t move.

“Libby?”

I stayed perfectly quiet, not scared so much as resigned to the fact that he was following me, maybe all of us, and it was weird. He brought danger wherever he went because people were looking for him. It wasn’t his crimes now that bothered me as much as knowing that he was someone who was confused and could also be violent. I couldn’t lose the picture of him terrorizing people, punching out their windows and then standing there naked and bleeding in the dark.