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not in our family. And upstairs, my mom was at her computer, looking somewhere else, too. Audra had always talked to me, and I had talked to her, but now even Audra had someone else, somewhere else, this person who knew more than I did, this girl who knew things, who knew how to live out in the woods.
    Dad turned around; he lifted the headset from one ear. “What are Audra and your mom up to?”
    â€œNothing,” I said. “Mom’s in the bedroom with the computer, I think. Audra, I don’t know. I should do my homework.”
    â€œGood girl,” he said.
    I turned and climbed back up into the kitchen, through it and up the stairs toward my bedroom. At the top, outside Audra’s door, is where the floor creaks. If you know how to step there, your feet wide, right where the floor meets the wall, you can still do it silently.
    Back in my room, I took off my life jacket, hung it in the closet, then set the yellow notebook on my desk. I opened it, read through those words again.
    To think only of sharpness is a mistake
,
    of course, as girls are also soft, and that
    is part of their power. Electrical storms
    become all snarled up in soft clouds
.
    That was about me. I liked that these words were being sent to me, only for me. I was a girl with a snarl inside. A snarl is a knot, a tangle, and it can also be a sound.

FOUR
    I waited until lunchtime. Then I walked right across the sports fields, past groups of kids who were talking on their cell phones, not paying attention to anything around them. Still, I kept expecting someone to call out or come after me. I didn’t turn back to look at the windows of the school where some teacher might be watching, wondering where I was going.
    And once I was out of sight, turning the corner and down the street, Audra was standing there, right where she said she’d be. She just looked up and waited, and then we walked along without saying anything, past the QFC supermarket, past Beverly Cleary Elementary, downtoward the highway and the MAX train station. I looked back, once. No one was following.
    We crossed a parking lot, then the bridge above the train tracks. We could already hear the train coming, so we ran down the stairs to the platform.
    On the train we swung our backpacks around and set them on the floor. Audra smiled at me, reached out and touched my shoulder. There was ink all over her right hand, the words too smeared to read. She is left-handed.
    â€œThis girl knows a lot,” Audra said. “She taught herself with books instead of going to school, grew her own food. She was hiding all the time, invisible—no one could find her.”
    â€œSo we’re going to the woods?”
    â€œNo,” Audra said. “They caught her, finally, moved her to another place, said she had to go to school.”
    â€œYou said no one could catch her.”
    â€œIt was an accident, getting caught. It wasn’t her fault. Still, there’s a lot of things she can teach us.”
    The ring where Audra’s nose had been pierced was gone. Her ears were covered by her hair swinging down,but her hair wasn’t snagging on her earrings like it usually did.
    â€œLike what?” I said.
    â€œWhat?” Audra said.
    â€œWhat’s she going to teach us? How to be like her?”
    â€œNo,” Audra said. “How to be like ourselves.”
    â€œOkay,” I said, not sure what she meant. I felt the wheels clacking through the floor, through the soles of my sneakers. The train went around a curve, the middle part bending like an accordion.
    â€œI mean, what do you think’s going to happen to me?” Audra said. “I’m supposed to go to college, then meet some guy and probably marry him and then every day we both wake up and drive to work where we sit in cubicles and there probably aren’t even any windows or anything?”
    Her voice was loud enough that people were looking over at us. I unzipped my pack and