She never drove out to the farm; she couldn’t be caught around that stuff; she shouldn’t be caught around me. They prayed before meals at households in The Church. What Lisbeth believed herself didn’t seem to matter. Singing was the reason she stayed, she said. They taught her other things she couldn’t seem to unlearn: marriage was coming. Jesus was coming in a fireball that would divide the Earth into the good and the lost. She would have to decide. She would have to be ready to go with Him. She wore sensible shoes, kept her hair long. She was always waiting for men.

I didn’t know the song they performed at what would be the last graduation ceremony, the final graduating class; the last time the platform groaned under the risers; the last time the wind tried but could not unsettle the principal’s hair, buzzed short on his flat head. The school building behind us was already freezing, empty as a factory. I only listened to Lisbeth’s voice, clear and strong alongside the choir, guiding them, blending, but sometimes rising above them.

By the time the principal’s send-off to the class rolled around, a few families had left, back to their trucks. The speeches had been interminable in the cold. The sky looked gunmetal gray, a color that seemed familiar but also wrong. The wrong time of year for it.

The principal said, “Go forth. Go forth and don’t just plant seeds of change. Let yourself take root.”

What was he saying, who was he talking about or to? Go where? Do what? There were more eighteen-year-old local girls in jail than there were in town. I knew if I lingered at the reception in the gym, which I wasn’t planning to—red punch that stained, dead boys staring out at me from photographs in the trophy case—some of the new graduates would ask me for work. Or weed.

The principal had a white jutted jaw, a way of droning on. And in the middle of his speech, it began to snow.

The crowd murmured. The principal broke off midword. Whatever he had to say, he would never finish it. Some of the seniors stuck out their tongues or turned up their palms to catch the snow, like children.

Snow in June. It was thrilling for a second, before we thought about it. From her seat onstage with the choir, Lisbeth and I exchanged a glance. No spring again. No spring this year.

June passed. The gray sky deepened. Every morning I woke in my tiny house, telling myself I would not have to light a fire, not this morning, not this late, not in summer. But then I felt the ache from shivering all night. I felt the air, crisp as bones. I swung the quilt around my shoulders and crept down the ladder. In the dark I fed wood into the stove.