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knew we didn’t have that long.
    “I leave for Basic on the fifth,” he said.
    “Oh, Scott,” I started crying again in protest. “You’re not even going to finish school?”
    “I’ll finish when I get back,” he replied, because he would never say what he meant. As well as Scott did with his lessons, he sure hated doing them, and he wasn’t going to spend his last days taking exams before he shipped off to stare death in the face. “I’ll be all right, Lizzie,” he tried to assure both of us, and I didn’t know which of us was least convinced. “Do you believe me?”
    “I believe you,” I whispered, but, though I wished I could, I didn’t.
    T hat night, after dinner, during which Scott and Daddy and I shared a secret we couldn’t tell Mama, I sat for a long time on the porch. So long Mama came out twice to tell me to come in before I froze, and that Scott came and went after he said he was turning to ice and the Army wouldn’t take him if his trigger finger fell off.
    Although I could see my breath, and I knew it was as cold as everyone kept telling me, I didn’t feel the cold. I felt only the pain, and I knew it was pain I deserved. All day long, I had wanted Scott to go away, to leave Ariel alone. Then, he told me he was going, and I couldn’t help but think I had some power I didn’t know about, that I couldn’t control, to wish my loved ones away.
    When the door opened again, I knew it had to be late, and as I watched Ariel come through it, I realized she was the last person I expected to see, and the person I wanted to see most.
    “Scott said you’ve been out here for hours,” she said.
    “Scott exaggerates,” I returned, amazed she had come to find me on her own. It was rare that Ariel and I were alone. Stuck in that house all day, we were together a lot, but always under the watchful eye of others.
    Smiling an uncertain smile, as if she wasn’t sure which of her contradictory sources to believe, me or Scott, Ariel laid the blanket she’d brought across my lap and sat down on the swing next to me, closer than usual, giving it a little push by accident that sent us swaying back and forth.
    “Are you all right?” she softly questioned, and, suddenly aware of the cold on my face as the rest of me thawed beneath the warm fabric of the blanket, I didn’t know what the words meant any more. There was the ‘all right’ that used to be, the one before the war, when we never went without, but things were bleak for so many people around us. Then, there was the ‘all right’ after the war started when we all realized the ‘all right’ we knew before was more ‘all right’ than we could have ever imagined, because no one in our family had been shipped across the ocean to die yet.
    Glancing to the door, I wondered if Scott had already told her, if he and Ariel shared such secrets with each other, like they shared their touches without hesitation.
    “He’s going to war,” I said, and Ariel didn’t need to ask who. Though, Daddy had registered too when it became law for men his age, they had no need for a man with one bad eye and half-good knees on the field of battle.
    “Oh,” Ariel replied, and I could tell she didn’t know. Watching her stare into the night, I could see her thinking of all those soldiers she had seen, the ones around Scott’s age, dying, as she said, of unnatural things.
    Maybe because of that, Ariel didn’t lie to me like most people would have lied, like Scott had lied. She didn’t tell me he would be fine, that he would come back as the same Scott. She didn’t tell me he would come back at all. She just sat next to me in silence, letting me be smart enough to have my own opinions.
    “You know our brother Edward died in the war?” I asked her, and, glancing to me, Ariel gave a small nod of confirmation.
    Edward had a ghost’s presence in Nan’s house. We still talked about him, but like he was still right there, as if he was just off in the woods gathering