The yellow-headed boy whose name Dee still cannot recall begins to breathe fast, like a woman giving birth. He runs from them, crashing away through the forest.

Dee touches Lulu’s hand where it lies on the gritty sand. Loosely grasped in Lulu’s palm is a deep green stone, shot through with veins of white. It is oval and planed smooth by water and time. Pretty pebble. Dee moans. Threads of fresh blood seep from Lulu’s head into the water. They blow up into crimson clouds.

Dee’s legs and arms are slick with lake water, with blood. She bends again and breathes into Lulu’s mouth. A sound comes from Lulu’s chest. It is deep like the creak of a tree branch.

From under Lulu’s body there comes a flexing thing, a line of dark. The snake curls over Lulu and brushes against Dee’s thighs. It looks like a cottonmouth, but there are no cottonmouths round here. Small shadows follow it. Young hatchlings. Now Dee sees the puncture wounds on Lulu’s swollen ankles. That’s why she fell.

Dee is a stone in the water. She feels the bodies glancing gently against her thighs. The snakes seem to regard her as part of the lake or the land. Then she hurls herself up and out, throwing great sheets of spray. She claws up across the warm rock. A very small snake is coiled six inches from her hand. It opens a white mouth at her then flows away, down into a dark crack in the rock. Dee screams and runs blindly, leaving Lulu where she lies, half in, and half out of the water.

Dee can’t see; there’s something in front of her eyes like a cloud of flies or a hurricane. She tries to blink it away but she can’t so she slows, and then stops. The cold trickles of bloody lake water keep coming down the backs of her legs, and she is panting. She thinks she might faint so she stops for a moment. She leans against a broken stump, silvered and dead with age. All she can see at her feet are snakes. Stop, she commands her body and mind. Stop. No snakes here. She has to think.

A new little voice speaks in her mind. At least Lulu can’t tell Mom and Dad on you now. She sobs. How can she even think such a horrible thing?

Gnats swarm greedily at the blood on her. She tries to scrub it off. But she is shaking and it has stained her shorts. Instead she ties her sweater round her waist to hide it as best she can. Blood, blood, Dee thinks in a fog. Fresh threads of blood. The next thought shines out, knifes through her hard and quick. Lulu was still bleeding. Dee has watched enough TV to know what that means. She is not dead.