“I had high hopes. Happy solstice,” Sean whispered.

My knees went goosey.

In a wobbly line in the cold dark, we followed the candlelight on paths through fields, into dense forests, and best of all, along the shore of a pond full of frogs and night birds floating sleepily. The bobbing line of tiny golden starlight in the jelly jars reflected in the black water.

Past the pond we continued to a wooden bridge, voices of some school choir kids in the dark singing my very favorite winter song, even though it talks about Jesus and his insatiable need for gifts, “In the Bleak Midwinter.”

“I can’t take it,” I whispered. “I think I might pass out.”

“It’s too dark to faint, keep it together!” he whispered back.

“Shhhhh!” The old people in front of us turned to scowl.

“Hey,” he said, quieter, “what is extended care?”

“It’s a super unromantic thing to talk about on a candlelit walk.”

“Got it.”

I took his hand and pulled him off the trail. “I’m nervous. I want to give you your present now,” I whispered.

“You’re nervous? Is it a box of snakes?”

“A box of…what mall are you shopping at?”

“I don’t know! What kind of present makes someone nervous to give?”

“And your first thought is snakes?” I pressed a small wrapped package into his hands.

“Oh, Muir,” he said, holding his lantern over the brass compass I’d taken from my pillowcase bag that morning. “Are you sure?”

“I am.”

“Because I love it. So much.”

“You do?”

“It’s just like Muir’s. You honestly don’t need it?”

“I’m getting better at finding my way. I thought, maybe, you could carry it for me.”

He kissed me, and the golden lights passed by us in the dark. “God, I love winter. Pitch black and it’s only six o’clock. We really have till midnight?”

“Midnight.”

He looked up in the moonless sky, stars scattered like glitter. “My whole life on this island, and this is my first solstice walk.”

“My whole life anywhere, and it’s my first. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said, holding the compass in both his hands. “I promise if you get lost, I’ll come find you.”

We stood and shivered, eyes on the sky. “Sean. Is your mom really gone until Monday?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” I said. “Really.”

I carry with me a brass compass I wish I did not need, but this, Joellen says, is the rub of dependence born from fear; a snake eating its own tail.

Joellen gave me Muir’s Wilderness World, so it was sort of her fault I started walking away from every house she put me in the moment I arrived, just to feel the familiar outside. But also there was a third-grade teacher who bears some of the responsibility.