My stomach grumbles as I climb out of my canoe. The sun has set, and my soaked clothes stick to me in cold patches that make me wish I was naked. I use my towel to protect my book and wring out my clothes as best I can.

On my walk home, for the first time ever, I notice how quiet these woods are. Or, maybe it just feels like it is because I don’t have a chatterbox girl walking with me.

My excitement at having made a new friend is mixed up—a feeling that I know really well. Envy.

Then, I feel a flush of shame. I’m jealous of a weird looking, clumsy, tiny, ten-year-old girl. But I can’t help it. Because she’s happy, even when she shouldn’t be. She told me her daddy and sister died. And because she gets to live somewhere other than here. She has a suitcase full of books and more where those came from.

She asked me to come up to her house and meet her aunt. But I couldn’t do that. We’re not supposed to make ourselves knows to outsiders. We’re supposed to avoid them if we see them. My stepfather says that if people find out about us, they’ll come and take us all to jail. If it was just him, I wouldn’t mind. But I would never do anything that would make my mama even sadder.

I’m already late. I know Mama’s probably already had to cover for me. If I’m much later, he’ll come looking.

He might find the hole in the fence I slip through to get to the woods.

He might find out Mama’s been covering for me.

I walk faster.

As the very last sliver of sun slips away, it reminds me of Apollo’s question while we’d been walking.

“Do you know why it gets dark?” she asks.

“Huh?” I ask, glancing down at her. She’s weird.

“Why the sun sets, I mean,” she says

“Who cares why the sun sets,” I say. I’m embarrassed that I don’t know.

“The sun doesn’t set,” she corrects me. “It only looks like it does because the earth rotates on an axis.” She mimics the motion with her fingers. “It makes one complete circle around the sun every twenty-four hours. So, as this town turns toward the sun and begins to enter its light, it looks like it’s rising in the east.” She points in the direction of where the high afternoon sun is.

She traces a path westward with her finger.

“And when the town begins to leave the sun’s light and therefore, getting dark, it appears to set in the west.”

I didn’t say anything. But my heart raced with excitement. This is truly exciting. I had no clue.

Our town’s school, that’s run by my father and the other church elders, doesn’t teach anything but the story of creation and simple sums. Everything I know outside of that is what my mother used to teach me before.

She never taught me why the sun set. I used to think like everyone else in Cain’s Weeping that God made the sun drop out of the sky every evening only to return bright and victorious every morning.

But I haven’t believed in God for a long time. At least, not the God he preaches about. Not this God that everyone in town is so afraid of.

Not since Ellie died.

He refused to take her to the doctor.

My mother kneeled in front of him and begged. When Ellie’s body broke out in a rash that made her look like a human strawberry, she tore clumps of her hair out of her head and begged. She screamed, cried, and then finally prayed to God to break the fever that was killing her baby.

All he said was, “God’s will shall be done.”

My sister died, gasping for breath in my mother’s arms. Her fever blisters made her unrecognizable. And he had just prayed and thanked God for accepting Ellie into his kingdom.

I’ve never felt anything close to love for that man.

He had been someone to obey. Someone to fear. Someone to avoid.

But that day, I started to hate him.

And his god.

He wasn’t my father. But he had been Ellie’s.

No real father would stand by and watch his daughter die in his wife’s arms.

No real father would use his daughter’s death as a cudgel to further cow his already kneeling wife.

No decent man would tell her that Ellie’s death was punishment for her failure to give him a son.

And no god worth worshiping would let a child die like that in her mother’s arms if he could save her by simply saying it should be so.

So, God was either not real, or he was powerless and cruel.

Either way, I was done.

I found the lake a few days after we buried Ellie.

He went to town without my mother. She lay in her room and wailed so loudly that I couldn’t stand it. I’d started running and ended up in the forest behind our house. I ran farther than I ever had before. Farther than I knew I was allowed.

I found the chain-link fence that served as a border to our town. And right where I stopped, there was a break in the links that pulled apart, and I crawled through to the other side.

I walked through a cornfield until I reached the forest that hides the lake from view.

Now, every day while my stepfather is in one of his leadership meetings, between the hours of two to four, I come here.

Every day the adventures of Bilbo Baggins chase away the living, endless nightmare of my life.

It’s the closest thing I feel to what I imagine heaven is like. And today, my little slice of heaven got even better.

The girl who literally fell from the sky is the first person who’s not from here that I’ve actually ever spoken to since we moved here ten years ago.

She’s already taught me something I didn’t know. I thought her smiling was weird, but it’s nice to have someone not be angry or sad at the sight of me.

It makes me feel warm, like the sun shining on me.

I can’t remember the last time my own mother smiled at me. She’s barely spoken a word since Ellie died.

Before, she told me stories of our life before she married him and moved us here. She told me about the buildings in the big city and how they rose up and disappeared into the clouds.

She told me that there were entire buildings full of books, that you could walk in and read anything they had on their shelves. Even if you didn’t have any money.

She talked about us going to see all those things one day and then she just stopped.

All I had left is my book. All my hope, happiness, and motivation bound together and held together inside those pages.

Until today.

Today, I made a friend, and tomorrow, we’re meeting at the lake. She’s bringing me more books, and I’m going to get to read them.

I look up, and the moon is clearer than I remember it ever being. I stare up at her, and for the first time in my life, I feel like she’s looking at me, too.