“They made me cut it,” I said, taking his hand and rubbing it over my buzz cut. “I wanted to cut it,” I added.

“I like it,” he said. He smelled like pine soap. Like Dice. The strangest thing, I realized, was seeing his face move, how the smile made his upturned nose a little wider, how his cheeks rumpled and then flattened, how his eyebrows jumped while he talked, as though from exertion. I’d forgotten these things. “What are they calling you? Harmony?” he laughed. All these months, even without a photograph, I’d been imagining his face in one position, static and serious. His front tooth was chipped; had it always been?

“Come on, Zacky,” I said, trying to remember how we used to talk. I wanted to say, They named me as they saw me. I’m different from the uncertain girl you knew in Durham. But I was tongue-tied, and nervous that Osha might be watching, or Sara, or Bay, or worst of all, Dice.

“Zacky?” he said. “That’s a new one.”

I pulled down the ladder to the hayloft, now piled to the rafters, three stories’ high, with fragrant hay. Isaac exclaimed and threw himself onto the foot of a hay pile. “Ow!” he said, leaping up. I’d once found hay prickly too.

“How did you get here?” I asked. I kept as quiet as I could.

“Easy enough,” Isaac said. “Lindsay told me you were with a group called the Ash Family. She said, ‘They took my boyfriend.’ ”

“It didn’t happen that way at all. See, Roger—well, now we call him Rainer—”

“Lindsay is clueless,” he said. “I get why Roger would leave her.” He picked hay off his pristine hoodie. “She opened my darkroom door.” But I didn’t want to imagine her coming to his darkroom at all.

He said once he was in Asheville, he asked around for someone named Bay. He’d stayed at a squat till Bay came around.

“That’s a lot of trouble to come out here,” I said.

“Not so bad,” he said. He was playing it off lightly. “I thought,” he said, “I thought it’d be good for my photography, to see the mountains. I had some free time.”

He was lying. I pictured myself hunkering down, rooting into the Asher soil. He wouldn’t pull me out—not now, when I was just beginning to grow. I couldn’t let Isaac shrink me back down to Durham’s scale and contain me in his little room among gardenia flowers that creased and browned immediately after getting plucked.

“Did you bring your camera?”

He took a plastic disposable out of his Target bag and wound the clicking wheel.

“Put that away,” I said. “Keep it in your bag.”

“Can’t I take a photo of you?”

“We don’t like tourists,” I said.