“You’re lucky to have a friend who is as grown up as her,” he says, guiding Tai back toward his car on the drive.

[The camera clicks off.]

[The camera clicks on again in Teddy’s car.]

He falls forward in the driver’s seat, half asleep, and then jerks awake. The camera turns to Saxim, who watches him with wide eyes, her backpack hugged to her chest. Then it turns to face the outside. The humid sky is the color of rust. Tai swivels for a selfie and presses her nose onto the glass of the car window. She breathes onto the glass, fogging it up, and draws her initials, then Noni’s, onto the surface with her forefinger in block print. The letters melt away.

A sign flashes past outside:

TREASURE YOUR LIFE. STAY OUT OF THE FOREST.

Then another, this one covered in graffiti, but plainly showing a diagram of a hunched figure with butterflies where the eyes should be, with an X through the chest.

Then a figure, a pale figure, but only for a second, before—

[The camera clicks off with a jolt.]

I swallow hard, the grass prickling my ankles. Because I remember what I saw.

A woman with long hair and slender arms and legs. In the woods, smiling at me.

It took only a glimmer of her to know the angle of her head was wrong, hooked down, like she was a circus gymnast ordered to use only her neck muscles to hang from an invisible trapeze, leaving the rest of her body slack and asleep.

It was so impossibly scary I didn’t tell Saxim, I didn’t tell Teddy, I didn’t tell anyone.

Oh my gosh. Its crooked form haunted my nightmares for months.

I remember telling myself: It could’ve been a branch. It probably didn’t exist. But even if it did … It’s not Mama, I told myself. It’s not Mama, broken and smiling.

But I remember thinking then that what happened to Mama could happen at any time to anyone I love. It could be happening at this moment to Noni. To Dad. They could change. They could leave me, just like that. I promised myself then that I would do everything I could to keep that from happening. To bring them only brightness and goodness and effervescence. To avoid the darker corners of my head and to only travel in the light. To delight and enchant everyone, so they would stay.

To record everything I could, so I wouldn’t forget how things should be.

It feels like drowning, to remember this ten-year-old pain, and even my throat and my eyes fill up.

[The camera clicks back on.]

Tempura dinner. Saxim picking out a shrimp leg from Teddy’s throat, because she has the smallest fingers. They laugh hysterically.

Saxim and Tai picking the room they want to sleep in at Teddy’s huge Mitella house.