I laughed. “Yeah, pretty much. My mom’s hair used to be super long, like I picture an elf having. Now it’s short, like pixie short. She walked into a Great Clips and cut it off the morning of Sam’s funeral. But before, it was the kind of hair you notice on the street. She could sit on it.”

“Whoa!” said Jasper. “She really was a hippie poet, huh?”

I shook my head. “Not since I can remember, really. She mostly looked like other moms, just with super long hair. But whenever we went camping, she would do this thing, where she’d put it in two long braids. And then when we went on a hike, I’d collect things, and we’d stick them into her hair.”

“Like twigs and rocks, you mean?” Jasper made a face. “Squirrels?”

“No, silly! Like flowers and leaves,” I said. “Beautiful things. She’d let me weave it all into her braids. So the longer we hiked, the more she’d turn into this amazing elf queen. I loved it, seeing her like that. Once, I found a locust shell, and I touched it to her braid, just a little bit, and it clung there, like that. Holding on to her. She was so happy, she kept it there all day.”

I stopped walking for a minute. That memory seemed so very far away now, so impossible. I tried to imagine what Mom would do if I tried that today, if I held up a locust husk to her. I was pretty sure she’d flinch.

“Anyway”—I took a breath—“when I tried to take the locust shell out later, it shattered, just broke right apart, in my fingers.”

“Ugh,” said Jasper.

But it wasn’t ugh to me, that memory. It was beautiful. “It was so easy to pick it up and put it there, that husk, but there was no way to take it out without breaking it.” I sat and thought about that for a minute.

“Ugh,” said Jasper again. “So then she had dead locust bits in her hair? I think the Vine Realm is plenty of outside for me. You can keep your snakes and bugs and locust shells.”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “But the thing is, somehow bugs are different when you’re camping. You just have to believe me about that. And s’mores are delicious, and flaming brains are fun.”

“Well, we don’t need to sleep outside to eat marshmallows,” said Jasper. “What’s a flaming brain?”

“It’s when you set newspapers on fire,” I said.

“Where I’m from that’s called pyromania,” said Jasper.

“No,” I said, laughing. “It’s not like that. You fold them up in a special way and they float. Up into the air, which is all dark and everything. They fly. Like magic lanterns.”

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever you say, pyromaniac!”