There we were, one hot sticky summer. I remember the smell of bug spray, that sweet, sickly odor. In the summer, the swamp air is thick and foul. We rose early to go out, while morning mist still floated gently over the green water, which pulled us insistently forward, caressing the edges of the canoe. The sky was pink, and apart from the tugging water, the swamp felt very still, like it was just waking up. A settling peace came over me. The swamp was beautiful, calm.

Floating along, we were carried among the strange tentacles of the cypress. I never wanted to leave this place, where even the smell of bug spray became familiar, the perfume of the woodland made lovelier by it. Even with it, small flies and mosquitoes formed clouds above the water and flitted into our canoe. Elizabeth slapped them away.

“Where are we?” she asked. This was farther than we’d ever come. We had stolen into a small creek that branched off from the main waterway.

“I can’t believe it,” she added, when my only response was to shrug. “I can’t believe you got us lost!”

“How is it my fault?”

She leaned over the side of the canoe, as if the depths of the water would tell her anything of where we were. We were far from home and now hours into the swamp, likely miles from anything resembling civilization—and the remoteness, the isolation, the thrill of it, actually excited me. I was too young to realize the acute danger we might be in, though, and I wouldn’t tell Elizabeth. She was already too close to panicking. We had abandoned order and reason; we were in the wild. We floated in the reeds.

Elizabeth stood up, and the canoe rocked so much I gripped the sides as we shifted back and forth. “What are you doing?”

She looked around, as if a slightly higher vantage point would help her figure out the way to go. By now the water had become still and glassy beneath us.

“Well?”

“I don’t see anything.”

“What were you hoping to see?”

My nonchalant question irritated her. “Shut up, Sam!”

“Sorry. I wasn’t aware you needed silence to see.”

She cursed at me in sign language. In spite of the rudeness, I laughed. Apparently this was the wrong reaction to have, since her face turned red and tight-lipped with fury.

“You are insufferable,” she spat. “What do you think of your good-luck charms now? How well have they worked for us?”

I fiddled with the dull pencil in my pocket, and a pencil eraser with a star carved into it, which called to mind good omens. In my other pocket was the wing feather of a great egret, long and white and soft. I had been carrying these talismans with me all summer as shielding, to ward off Mother’s alcoholic bile and Elizabeth’s searing glare. As of right now, my artifacts did not seem to be working very well, and I determined to find new ones as soon as we were home again, since these had lost their magic.