“That was weird,” Imogen said in a way that made it clear she approved. She stretched her arms way up, like she might accidentally stay bottled if she wasn’t careful. “Can we do more stuff like that?”

The second Hawthorn heard the question, she knew it was the one she’d been hoping for.

Imogen gave them a secret kind of smile. “I do things like this when I’m alone sometimes. Go to graveyards and touch every grave to see if any of them feel different. Or, when it rains, I catch the drops on my skin and if they make a shape, that shape will be a message about what’s happening in my life, some kind of secret. My parents don’t know what to do with me,” she added with very specific intonation, as if quoting something they said a lot. “They think I’m a bad influence.”

“On who?” Lelia asked with a snort.

“Haven.” That was Imogen’s little sister. The group had met her when they picked Imogen up from her house. Haven had red curls and cream-top skin. She had wanted to talk, so they all sat around the kitchen island for an hour, letting Haven be precocious for as long as they could stand. It had been almost impossible to peel Imogen away from her little shadow.

“So what?” Lelia asked. “We’re witches now?” She ran her fingers over the ferns on the mother tree where she was sitting.

“I want a name that’s ours,” Hawthorn said.

Imogen nodded with a grave sort of understanding. Everyone else watched closely, in case she leaked something brilliant.

Then Rachel leaped in, her voice soft and unsure. “Magic tastes like a spoon dipped in honey. Solid and liquid, silver and gold. Witch, though . . . It’s like when you go to the beach and the sea is gray and the sky is gray and you can’t tell which gray is which. That’s how witch tastes.”

“What are you babbling about?” Lelia asked.

“Rush has synesthesia,” Imogen announced proudly.

“Is that contagious?” Lelia asked.

“Who’s Rush?” June added, looking hungry for the secrets that Imogen and Rachel shared.

“That decides it,” Imogen said. “We’re the Grays.”

“What do we do?” June asked.

“Anything,” Hawthorn said.

“Everything,” Imogen said at the same time.

“We live,” Lelia shouted, standing up on the tree, stretching her body up toward the sky.

“We die,” Hawthorn bookended.

Lelia tipped her thumb down. “Booooo.”

“You can’t live unless you’re willing to die,” Hawthorn parroted, not even knowing they were Ora’s words until she’d already dressed them up in her own voice and passed them off as her opinion.

“What if there are other options?” Imogen asked, kicking her shoes off, anchoring her feet in the bark.