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birth, Sage and EZ Out couldn’t agree on whose name to use. One day in town, Sage got to talking to a man named Barefoot G eorg e, who used to live in a school bus and led a decidedly shoeless existence. Sage explained her predicament to him.
    â€œI don’t know what I’m going to do,” she told him.
    â€œWhy don’t you call her Worldpeace?” Barefoot George suggested. “There’s no reason to fight over a name. Give her the name Worldpeace, and there will be peace over this.”
    Sage liked the sound of that, and the idea that every time people heard her daughter’s last name, they would have to think about peace on earth, even if just for a moment.
    So Emma Worldpeace was bestowed her unusual last name, one that she would carry into adulthood and that in many ways would help define her. As she would one day explain, “It’s hard to be an asshole when your last name is Worldpeace.”
    *  *  *
    When Emma was still a baby, the family moved to a new home. The house was a two-story geodesic dome on eighty acres located deep in the rolling, grassy hills of a community called Salmon Creek. The building was covered in shingles and looked like a giant orb. The main living space was a round, open room with a kitchen that looped around to the left. It had giant windows that were framed by the grapevines that grew outside, and rugs were spread across the floor for people to sprawl upon.
    Downstairs, there was a secret passageway. The entrance was next to the bedroom where Lisa, Emma’s younger sister, was born. In the cool, dark root cellar where Sage stored her preserved pickles and jellies, a hidden panel opened and led to a crawl space that wound up through the walls. It was a favorite spot for Emma and her siblings when they played hide-and-seek.
    Life at the dome, as they called it, was a world unto itself. The highway was a forty-five-minute drive away, and “town,” Garberville or Redway, an hour away. Not that they ever needed to go anywhere. The property was a wonderland where just walking to the top of the two-mile-long driveway was an all-day adventure. Snacks grew on the pear, fig, and walnut trees that dotted the property, and what seemed like the world’s biggest mulberry tree towered behind the goat shed. Up a steep hill from the dome, in a giant oak, someone had built a tree house that could make a child’s heart sing; it had a working woodstove, a small deck, and a stained-glass window.
    Like most everyone in their community, Sage and EZ Out supported themselves by growing pot. For Emma, this was as normal as if her parents raised cows or worked in an office. Sometimes she’d join her mom and siblings and carry water deep into the woods to water the plants, which were hidden under the forest canopy. It didn’t occur to her then that there were risks to the work, or that her parents could go to jail for what they were doing.
    That realization would come later, in a shockingly sudden way.
    At the time, there was a more visible shadow to life at the dome. EZ Out was a drinker. He could go through twenty-four beers in a day. Sage had come to realize that she couldn’t count on him to help with the children or the crop. She kicked him out, and EZ Out began the deeper descent into alcoholism that would land him in San Quentin State Prison for drunk driving a few months later.
    Around this same time, Sage figured it was time to buy a property of her own. She found a house in another small hill community, called Ettersburg. Morning Glory Manor, as the house was called, was located down a dirt road lined with twisted red manzanita. The driveway meandered past the barn where Emma’s older siblings, Aia and Omar, slept, and then the horse corral and vegetable garden, before it turned up an impossibly steep grade. At the crest of the hill, next to the shed where the generator was stored, Morning Glory Manor stood on stilts. It was