I walk through the opening. It’s much cooler inside the tree, as if this place has its own weather. A blunt darkness fills the space, and it takes me a minute to get used to the subtle shades hidden inside of it. When I do, there is nothing but a bike, a set of dirty clothes, and a dampness that won’t leave me alone.

The Grays: One Year Ago

Imogen baked things and brought them to his tree. Lemon bread. Hazelnut cookies. Chocolate praline. He got high on philosophy with June and more traditional substances with Lelia. Sometimes Hawthorn came back from his tree with mussed hair and a Don’t you dare ask look.

Rush asked the hermit where home was, the word tasting of slightly burned toast. He gave a rambling backroad of an answer, from an abandoned degree in psychology at UC Santa Cruz to a hometown in Virginia. Rush hummed songs for him, ones that sounded like blue hills at twilight.

On a bright day when they were all in the woods together, he asked, “Do you folks want to see my party trick?”

The Grays looked at one another, silently debating. Imogen stepped forward, having been voted the spokesperson with a round of nods. “As long as that isn’t a southern way of saying your penis.”

The hermit laughed and grabbed June by the waist, spinning her around in an impromptu dance. “I can look you in the eye for ten seconds and tell you something about yourself that nobody else knows. Maybe that you don’t even know.”

“Me first,” Lelia said, cutting in.

He steered her around the clearing, a smooth box step. “You don’t hate everybody half as much as you used to.”

Lelia scowled, but the hermit had already taken some of the sting out of it.

He turned back to June. He looked into her mossy-brown-green eyes, one finger beneath her chin. “You tell your parents that you believe in God, and you tell your friends you don’t, but you haven’t decided yet.” June thumbed the hollow at her neck, where a small gold cross was supposed to live. Her very devout Filipino Catholic mother would worry if it wasn’t there, which was why June put it back on every day before heading home. Her parents didn’t seem to mind the Grays, or June’s room filling up with crystals and herbs, as long as June joined them at church every Sunday. June lived in fear of the day when they noticed she wasn’t really singing along with the hymns. She was too busy trying to figure out if the magic she felt when she was out in the woods with the Grays was the same as the magic her mother felt in that big, dark room filled with shuffling people and the smell of incense.