I liked biology, too, but only certain things about biology: when we debated the ethics of keeping the brain-dead Nebraska woman alive so that her baby could gestate; or when we dissected a cow eye and found the tapetum lucidum, deep in the knot of corded white appeared this mother-of-pearl, this rumpled surface of glittering azure; or when we learned about the horror of climate change, the visions of superstorms punching into the stratosphere, the low-pitched warning of the inundated Outer Banks.

For climate change, I read, we’d have to adapt, and to mitigate, and to suffer. All three. But it was impossible to figure out what I could do that was big enough to help the migratory birds unable to find their resting spots, the bears starving to death, the ancient oaks dying off because of the relentless heat, the exterminated coral reefs, the pelicans caught in the black ooze. Not college, surely.

* * *

I wanted to keep talking to Bay. I said, “Tell me about your family.” And I leaned against the wall too, a little closer to him. He said he’d tell me everything. The Ash Family, they called themselves, because they got their start in Asheville, and because Dice, the father, said they were the leftovers from the purifying flame. “The heavy bits,” Bay said. About thirty people and growing. Sixty sheep, thirty cows, four pigs, twelve geese, sixty chickens, a raw-milk dairy, an orchard, a vegetable patch, an old farmhouse in a holler, a whole mountain to graze, a little utopia.

“We share everything—clothes. Money, our minds, our bodies,” he said lazily, appraising me. “It’s a real family. No one is ashamed of anything.”

“Well, that sounds nice,” I said.

“Does it?” he said.

“Sure,” I said. Isaac used to favor sure because it threw my weight back on me—Are you less angry now? I’d say, and he’d respond, with a shrug, Sure. This time, though, I meant it. The farm did sound nice.

“Look at you, you’re so lost! I like lost souls. I get along great with lost souls.” He laughed at me. I liked it. He was right.

* * *

Two days before I was supposed to leave home for college, my mother had tried to bake a yellow layer cake. She said it was for me; I said I didn’t want it. The cake came out flat, with a chewy rind. While I was trying to thank her for making it, she pushed it with two hooked fingers all the way along the countertop till it fell off the edge and onto the floor, where it landed with a thud.

“It didn’t turn out the way I wanted,” she said. Her face trembled, her loose eye bags and loose mouth so delicate and fine, the finest material in her vinyl and linoleum house—finer even than the jewelry.