But as it’s flying, something miraculous happens. A shimmer—a puff of something—appears, filmy and delicate but unmistakable, like the trail of exhaust you might see from an airplane. Only this is in a wave of colors and small, diaphanous shapes so exquisitely beautiful, so full of light, so warm and clear and sparkling that just looking at it makes something feel better inside you. The shapes are the shapes my mom has painted on the arrows; the colors are my mom’s colors come to life—as real and unreal, at the same time, as ghosts. They shimmer in the air for a moment, then disappear.

I turn to Germ just in time to see the same look of awe on her face a moment before the arrow hits its mark, landing with a thwack in the car’s front tire after all. There is a loud hiss as the tire loses air.

Germ says two things.

“Well, that was something.”

And then,

“David’s going to kill me.”

We practice for two hours, until my arms feel like they’re going to fall off and I can’t feel the pads of my fingers. When I want to give up, Germ makes me practice some more while she runs little circles around the yard and picks up the spent arrows. We take a break for dinner, and then we start again.

For a while, the beautiful shimmering trail of color flies out behind the arrow each time, but it gets dimmer and dimmer. Soon, it stops appearing altogether, which worries me.

“Maybe witch weapons have to rest,” Germ says.

By seven p.m., after about three hundred shots, I’ve hit the tree a total of four times. Still, three of those are in the last twenty tries, so I’m getting better. At this rate, if I practice all day again tomorrow, I should have a 20 percent chance of actually hitting the witch when she comes for me tomorrow night. As long as she stands as still as an oak tree, I guess. It’s not great odds, I have to admit.

Finally, spent, we lounge on the metal landing outside Germ’s front door, which all the Bartleys jokingly call “the veranda,” and drink Gatorade. We are quieter with each other than usual. Sometimes when we lie out here, we pretend to talk with our feet, so not talking with our feet is another sign that something is off. I know we are both worried about our friendship, underneath all the other things we are worried about. And what I really want to say is that I just wish things could always be the way they have been for us. But I don’t say that.

Instead I tell Ebb’s sad story to Germ. I tell her about my failed conversation with the Murderer, and how I even thought of running away before Ebb took me to his cave last night.