“Sure.”

“Can I . . . ?” She sets a finger to the canvas, and I freeze up.

These are the shoes that carried me all over Michigan, the ones I was wearing when I almost left in a stranger’s car. These are the thin rubber soles that brought me to California, the heels I sank back on when I kissed Hallie Carpenter. Rush wants to know if they’re part of my story, when they could probably tell the whole thing.

“Go for it,” I say.

Rush starts to draw on the canvas, and I try to crane around the view of her dark hair, but it doesn’t work. I have to wait. June gets the idea and picks out one of the pastels. “Hey, let me,” Lelia says, grabbing the dark green. Hawthorn crowds in last, picking up my soles one at a time so she can draw on those, too.

I wobble.

I wait.

When they kneel back, I pick up my feet and inspect what they’ve done. Here is a girl, more or less flying. Her clothes are a dark blur. Her short, unevenly chopped hair is yet another blur. There are redwoods, and sky, boiling blue day shading into night, stars everywhere. The Grays, below her, are waiting. When I pick up the soles of my shoes there’s Imogen. She’s with me, every step of the way. One dark eye with a strong brow staring out from each shoe.

“That’s me,” I say, my voice thawed by wonder.

The Grays: Four Years Ago

Hawthorn knew every single place in Tempest that could offer a thirteen-year-old some privacy. Alone didn’t really exist in her mom’s world. Ora wanted to put her hands in her daughter’s life up to the elbows.

So Hawthorn disappeared a lot. Not in a big, showy, gone-forever sort of way. Little trips to various nowheres. The High Point was good enough when she couldn’t leave the farm. But her favorite spot in the world was the mother tree, so that’s where she took the new friends she was making.

Hawthorn didn’t know how this was supposed to work. She had been homeschooled most of her life, until Ora cast her into the deep end of eighth grade. Hawthorn got the sense it was her grandparents’ idea. They were the furthest thing in the world from witches — lawyers. Ora’s rebellion had started with a spellbook purchased at fifteen and lasted the rest of her life. It became Hawthorn’s life, too. Her first and only real rebellion was finding friends and not immediately telling Ora everything about them.

“Why did you bring us all the way out here?” Lelia asked, panting from the hike, her face and neck and the backs of her arms stung an angry crimson.