“Leave me alone!”

It was a shriek, like a cat on fire, but Leo didn’t stop. He watched his feet and let the hill take him fast to the gulley where he slipped in a damp mound of pine needles. He caught his balance and walked fast over mud and rock after Allie, who was swinging her arms, walking barefoot down the shallow ditch, the bottoms of her feet shit-colored. “Stop! God damn you!”

She did. She kept her back to him. Her hands hung loose at her sides and her shoulders began to shake with her crying.

“You’re crazy. You’re fucking crazy. How could you do that?” He stepped forward and jerked her around to face him. Her hair spun and some of it stuck to her wet face. She kept crying, looking right at him, and the meanness slipped out of him but nothing came in to take its place; he didn’t feel a thing, really. Back in the cabin he had felt like crying, and when he ran after her he only wanted to catch her and make her hurt, push her, or punch her, even. But now, breathing a foot in front of her, he felt nothing. It was like blowing into a harp hole where the reed inside it is bent or twisted and you get no sound at all: He didn’t care how much she was shaking or how wet her face was; he saw that one of her hands was bleeding and he didn’t care about that; he noticed how steep the gulley was behind her, how he could give her a two-fingered shove and she’d fall and roll over backwards easy, but there was nothing for him in that either, so he didn’t move, and he didn’t speak. He stood there and stared at the blonde strand across Allie’s filled-up eyes. He heard his father call his name up the hill, but he felt even less about that.

Her crying slowed to a sniffle, and soon she stopped altogether. She pulled the hair free of her face, then she squatted and blew her nose into a bush. She stood, wiped her eyes, and said, “So, am I a witch now, Leo?”

Leo turned and headed across the gulley for the back of Spoon Hill. He was feeling things now, his throat for one: it was thick and all balled up. If he opened his mouth to speak, he would cry for sure. He started up the hill but the pine needles on the ground made him slip, and he had to pull on the tree trunks to keep moving.

“Last night we were just being brave, Leo!”

Her voice sounded like it was coming from two feet behind him, though he knew she hadn’t moved from where she stood. The sky at the ridge was purplish, almost dark. A lightning bug flashed off to his left, another one right in front of him.

“You’re such a hypocrite! I know you’re relieved!”