I ran to tell Lisbeth, the first one I thought to tell. She was tucking extra blankets on the bed in the house where we were both staying. Extra blankets for me. And her smile, when she heard my news, when she turned to me, was bright with the kind of open-faced joy I hadn’t seen on her—on anyone—in forever. She looked like spring.

“That’s great!” she said. “God provides.”

“But it was me,” I said. “It was me. I grew them.”

I don’t know what I expected. That news of the seeds sprouting would make her change her mind, would make her want to come with me. That it was a sign—and she had started to believe in signs.

But not this sign, not the seeds bursting from their brown casings like butterflies, spreading green wings.

She turned back to the blankets.

I didn’t tell Grayson about the seeds.

It was supposed to be nice to sleep in a real bed in the company town, under a real roof—Lisbeth and I had a nonleaky one. To sleep on a bunk, the mattress stuffed with hay and leaves. Guards patrolled the wild outside. The ceiling in the house stretched high enough I wouldn’t hit my head if I stood, unlike in my loft. And Lisbeth lay on the mattress beside me, her back pressed against my side, like we were on one of our old sleepovers.

But when she woke in the middle of the night to find me still awake, staring at the moon through the cracked window, she didn’t ask me if I had had a nightmare, what my dreams were, if I liked Grayson or not, if we had kissed. She only said, her breath sparking in the moonlight, “I’ll pray for you.”

I turned to see her hair fanning over her shoulder, pale as a mermaid’s. Her hand reached back to hold mine. Cold hands, warm hearts.

Her hand was bonier than I remembered, sliding into my palm. She fell asleep again instantly, shivering in her nightgown under the quilts and extra blankets, her tennis shoes that wouldn’t protect her. How fast, how far, could we run?

I had lost my friend a long time ago. Frost fractured the moon through the window into a million more shards.

We left after breakfast, Jamey, Starla, and I. It felt good to hear the truck start again. The sound meant freedom, survival. The truck heat, stale and sharp, had a dry smell like hay. How long would trucks have heat? I wondered. How could we slap this together with duct tape and wire?