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pulling at her hair and pushing up her sleeves. Her arms are rough and brown. “It’s happening! Right now!”
    The door to my mother’s office creaks open. Her footsteps pound down the hallway.
    “My mother’s coming,” I whisper.
    Lark scowls back. “She can’t hear me.”
    “Be quiet!” I whisper.
    “I won’t! What’s the big deal about a stab wound? Don’t you realize what’s happening to me? Don’t you know that the only thing worse than what that man did to me is turning into a tree? You’re not worried about your mother. You’re putting me off because you’re a coward.”
    “Stop!” I say.
    “And you’re selfish! So what if you have a few more nightmares? I’m about to lose my body forever! I’m about to turn into a tree!”
    But it’s too awful to see, too terrible to see the cut in her side, the place where the knife went in. I can’t do it without fainting or getting sick or so scared that I might never come back from being afraid.
    “I can’t,” I say. “I will later. I promise. I want to help, but I can’t right now.”
    Lark shakes her head. “Forget it. You had your chance. I’m never coming back here. I’m going to find someone else.”
    Outside the wind picks up. It thrashes the trees and shrieks through the neighborhood. Shingles lift off roofs and gates clatter. Lark opens my window and slips out, legs first.
    “Good-bye.”
    The curtains billow and snap in a riot of anger and frost. A gust of cold wind blows into my face. When I open my eyes, she’s gone.
    “Lark!” I lean out the window, calling after her. “Come back!”
    The clouds break and a sleeting rain falls. I’m pelted in the face, and my wet nightgown sticks to my skin. The rain is so cold, it stings. I leap to the ground and run through the gate at the edge of my yard. Broken branches pull out the hem of my nightgown. Fir trees rattle their dry cones. I fall and pick myself up and run into the woods. Eyes flash in the dark, eyes of dead girls caught in trees.
    “Little Night! Little Night!” they sing bitterly, mocking my name, hating me for failing Lark. “You’re too late. She’s like us now!”
    The rain turns to ice. The sky collapses in snow. I cross the creek, cracking paper-thin ice, cutting my feet on sharp stones. Lark waits on the other side, so white she is almost blue.
    “I’m here. I’m ready now,” I say. And I am. I’m tired of being afraid. I don’t want to be the one who fails her in the end.
    I stretch out my hand. Before my eyes, her fingernails extend into thin roots that wrap around my wrist and pull me into her.
    “Too late, too late, too late,” she says, sounding both mournful and pleased. I don’t know what she is now. Ghost or tree? Girl or wood?
    I try to draw back my hand.
    “Let me go,” I cry. I dig my heels into the cold earth and struggle against her.
    Behind me I hear running footsteps and someone yelling. It’s my mother. She pulls me away from the tree, and I fall into her arms. I hear the panic in her voice as she tries to help me stand. Finally she scoops me in her arms and carries me home. The trees shake their branches at me. They would like to tangle my hair and scratch my skin. All Lark wanted was someone to see what happened to her, but I’m only a girl, too afraid to look.
MAN ARRESTED IN DEATH OF TEENAGER
MARCH 7: A 29-year-old man faces arraignment next week after his arrest for the murder of a 16-year-old girl whose body was found in a heavily wooded area of Potomac Overlook Park. Police say they arrested Stephen Blaire before noon yesterday at his Fairfax apartment on suspicion of first-degree murder in the death of Lark Austin.
She was declared missing on January 24 after disappearing after her gymnastics lesson. She was found two days later, beaten and stabbed and dead from exposure after the area’s first major snowstorm. Detectives have not yet revealed what led them to arrest Blaire.

Chapter 20
Eve
    Under my window, men carry boxes