On Saturday, my mother let us walk to the library. We took home, between us, all the books on fairies, even the thick collections of folklore intended for adults. I had read many of them already, but it seemed, still, essential to have them on hand.

The road from the library to my house ran along a hill. When you were close to the top there were, on one side of the street, the big homes of our wealthier classmates, houses with windowed faces and sprawling backyards, rough gravel driveways and solar-panel-topped garages. The ground on the other side arched into grass, the dry, blond kind that was never really dead or alive. This had been Ruth’s and my favorite place for a while. It sloped down, farther on, into the haunted hill that bordered our schoolyard, and felt, thus, loaded with power. That hill was just hard enough to climb to make us desperate for it. Some of the trees grew practically sideways out of the slope, and once we got high enough we could lean ourselves in the Vs between their branches and trunks, our knees bunched up to our chests, our hair sticking on the bark.

We left our packs by the road that day, wanting to be free of the strain of them. I loved to go up the hill on all fours, my back bowed like a werewolf and my knees going to pieces in the dirt. “Right here,” I told Ruth, at the base of one of the biggest oak trees, and she scrambled up first. She crawled out over a branch low on her stomach, her shirt riding up so that she was dragging her belly over the bark.

I stayed closer to the trunk, leaning my back against it. “You should’ve let me go first,” I told Ruth. “You’re heavier than me.”

Ruth shrugged, sitting up with her legs splayed open, like she was riding a horse.

“We should’ve brought the books up.”

Ruth looked down at our backpacks, already brown with the dust a passing car had kicked up. “Yeah. Don’t you know it anyway?”

Because of this confidence, I was willing to forgive her. “Sure.”

The slope of the hill was steep and close beside us, so that I could reach back, sitting against the trunk, and brush the sharp ends of the low bushes with my fingers. It was easy to feel powerful here, above the street and close to the earth, and over the hill behind us that field where the girl had been mauled by the mountain lion. I imagined her ghost pink and translucent like a gummy bear, with indecent bloody rips in her throat and side. This was the wildest place I knew.

We had discussed, already, the signs of a changeling. Bad luck and strange, hard babies. “She wasn’t even supposed to get pregnant,” Ruth said. The miracle baby. That seemed to me to be the surest sign that maybe, like a character in a tale, Aunt Vera had had dealings with fairies, gotten what she wanted but not how she wanted it. What we were left to discuss, now, was what there was to be done.