Bay shook his head, disapproving. Isaac’s disapproval angered me. Bay’s disapproval made me feel as though I had something more to learn. Bay slipped the photo into his pocket and said, “How can you be so sure?” And he gave me a long hard look.

I wondered if Bay found me beautiful. I knew from biology that forensics workers appreciate suspects and victims who easily lose skin cells—because they leave their DNA everywhere. If I had beauty, it was this kind. I was always trailing strands of hair, smudging my clothes with my dye-dissolving sweat. I was easy to track.

“Let me tell you about one of our favorite ideas,” he said. I wondered about the word our. “From a Renaissance tramp doctor named Paracelsus. He said, ‘You who know nothing, love nothing. The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love. You who imagine that all fruits ripen at the same time as strawberries know nothing about grapes.’ ”

We sat in the dead-streaked grass next to the cinder-block Greyhound building. The sun tilted over the trees. The leaves were already starting to turn. In Durham, where my bags would arrive without me, I knew my mother and Isaac could sit under green for another month.

I thought about sixty sheep, thirty cows, four pigs, twelve geese, sixty chickens, a raw-milk dairy, an orchard, a vegetable patch. I tried to understand what Bay was saying about strawberries and grapes. It seemed ecological, which I liked; but no, he clarified, it was about love. He led me to his car. “The more knowledge you have, the more you can love,” he said. “Love comes from understanding, not from ignorance.”

I was in Bay’s car now, which smelled like the state fair—like manure, peanuts, ice cream. Isaac thought I couldn’t choose, but in reality I’d always known what I wanted. I wanted to be pushed around, pushed onto the ground to break with a thud. Bay helped me put my own will back into it. I chose to be his passenger.

CHAPTER 3

Bay said a cold snap was coming, and his car had no heat. “Never been this cold in this time of year,” he said. He gave me his long-underwear top and I wrapped the arms around me as we drove past shorn fields, trailers, tobacco stands, and subdivisions with enormous cheap houses and spongy sculpted grass.