Loving Isaac transformed me. I posed for him whenever he asked. When Forest Hills Park flooded from a hurricane, I clung to a tree above the creek, in which the gray water was churning by at a thousand miles an hour. We went out searching for an albino deer, and I hung from the fence posts. He liked how I was always willing. He realized this about me before I did. I was willing.

One night he found a long strand of my hair in his collar. He pulled it out like a magician pulling ribbon from his mouth. “Could make a bird’s nest from this,” he said. “I wonder how this even got here.” He laughed. “We haven’t even kissed yet.”

The yet was all I needed. I leaned my mouth into his. It was my first kiss, hot and salty.

I walked home from his house afterward. It was one of those spring nights when a thick fragrant mist evaporates off the road but can’t quite loft into the air. The streetlights pierced the miasma like dazzling stars way out in space. The insects sang in the glistening lawns. “Do you know that suburbs are actually more biodiverse than the wilderness?” he said that night. “All kinds of animals can live here. It’s a wonderland.”

* * *

Pear rang the breakfast bell, an old ram bell with a terrible clang. It was long past six a.m., and Queen and I had finished our honey and cream.

“I didn’t ask you about your first love,” I said.

“I know,” she said. She patted my arm, maybe a gesture of forgiveness, but what did she need to forgive me for? She and I had both broken a rule.

I should have pressed her on her friend who ran away. I should have asked her, Have you ever woken from a story Dice was telling you with real bruises? I should have asked, What was your life before, Queen? How does it feel to cut every tie? Does it hurt? Does it feel good?

Instead I said: “Better not to dwell on the past.”

The sun had drawn out the colors of early spring in the Southern Appalachians: pale taupe, mauve, angel blue, map blue. The turkey toms and ruffed grouse were beginning to display. River otters ran through the yard, sleek as fish. Snakes and worms came out into the sun.

The woods ticked like a clock as they thawed. Ice dropping. Water falling. Leaves popping open, beat by beat. Those shiny saw-edged leaf blossoms, green as poisonous snakes. Tick, tick, tick, drop drop drop.

* * *