‘He got so mad at me,’ I said. I wasn’t sure if I was speaking to June or the trees. ‘He was kind of a nature purist. I think it was one of those, uh, parenting moments. I was just trying to show him … I don’t know.’ June said nothing. I stood up. Wiped my face. ‘The river’s, it’s, uh, down here.’

June followed me. Ahead of us, past more awnings and meandering pathways, the trail sloped downwards, but before it got too steep it turned into a bridge that led over the bubbling water. Styx wasn’t the sort of river that rushed. It plodded. As if it knew it would get there eventually, so there wasn’t any hurry.

Once we’d made it to the bridge, I lingered near the barrier and rested my elbows on the railing to watch the Styx bubble past. ‘Can we sit?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, dude. Go for it.’

We cleared a spot by the end of the bridge, snow and ice tumbling down and dissolving away into nothing, and then sat, the silence situating itself on top of our eyelashes, in the creases of our clothes. There were no birds.

Is this it?

Panic swooped down, grabbed me by my shoulders and fed me to its chicks.

‘I hadn’t even seen snow before I moved here,’ June said, breaking the silence. She kicked her legs back and forth above the drop. ‘It’s pretty much what you’d expect.’

‘What was moving like?’

‘Yeah, it was rough, for sure. Definitely. At least at first. I worried about a lot. It was right at the beginning of high school, and I didn’t know anyone here, and – I don’t know, maybe it’s stupid – but being mixed, I was like, oh my God, this is gonna be horrible, everyone’s gonna be racist, whatever. And no. It wasn’t stupid. Because there was some of that for sure.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Hey, it happens. But, you know, there was this, like, overwhelming fear, because stuff would never be the same. I was leaving everything I’d ever known behind. And I don’t have family there any more, so, like, the whole of California might as well have burned to the ground, you know? There was no, like, reason for me to ever go back. Ever. And that was scary. Sad. I have this dumb memory of, like, driving away for the last time, and sitting in the back seat but facing behind us, you know, so I was always looking back at where we came from, because … I guess maybe I thought it’d, like, fall apart or something if I wasn’t there to look at it.