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was taking too much time and that what I was really into was art. We were downstairs in her den, the darkest, coolest room in her house. The bookshelves were filled with yellowed paperbacks and old board games. We were looking for something good to watch on TV.
    “But art doesn’t take a lot of time,” she said like I was ridiculous.
    “It does if you want to be good.” I passed her a magazine, pointing at a model with choppy bangs. Lark wanted a haircut.
    “Okay, maybe,” she said while studying the photo. “But it’s not like you have to go to a separate place or do it at only certain times of the day. You can draw before practice, or when you get home. You can draw while you watch TV.”
    “Not if you’re serious.”
    “But, Eve,” she said, “you’re not the serious type.”
    I flinched. It was like being slapped.
    “C’mon,” she pleaded. “Don’t quit. Who am I gonna hang out with? Who’s gonna walk with me to practice?”
    By this time I was standing up. I threw the magazine to the floor. “Get your parents to drive you. They drive you everywhere else.”
    I stomped home, my mind flooding with all the times she broke our plans, how we always had to spend the night at her house, how she chose everything we did, whether it was beading or cutting up gossip magazines or baking cookies. I slammed my front door so hard, the pictures bounced against the wall. Then I opened the door and slammed it again. The pictures bounced and settled even more crookedly. Good , I thought. Every time I saw them, I’d remember how selfish Lark was. I wasn’t going to be her fan anymore.
    Funny. The lie I made up about drawing became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The next week my mom signed me up at the Corcoran College of Art and Design. I took classes in art history, sculpture, painting, and drawing. A curator from the museum gave a lecture on Vincent van Gogh. He projected details of his letters to his brother Theo—flowers, windmills, portraits, and night skies; sketches of windmills and canals; the bare trees and fields he saw on his long walks through the country.
    At home on the shelf where my parents kept the art books, I found a collection of his letters and a huge book of all his drawings and paintings. I copied a woman sewing by a window in a straight-back chair. I drew his stark, brittle trees, rays of light, the garden of the hospital where he went to recover from fits of epilepsy and nerves.
    It was like Van Gogh’s feelings became mine. I stopped feeling my own because of Trevor, so I felt his instead. I read all his letters and copied out passages I liked on one wall of my room. “I want to get to a stage where it is said of my work,” he wrote Theo, “this man feels deeply.” I moved my grandmother’s dresser so no one can read them but me.

Chapter 15
Lark
    I was found and buried in a stupid white dress. The woods thawed and filled again with snow. I’m transparent and pale. The dress falls to my ankles and gets in my way. The dead girls blink against the wind. I scrape away the snow to look into their faces.
    I don’t want to be like you, I cry.
    It gets worse, says one. Some will say it’s your fault. For getting in the car. Or being alone. Or wearing a leotard that was cut too low in the back.
    Clouds tear apart. The narrow stream gurgles in the distance, strangled by reeds and rotting leaves. Everything is silver and blank like the back of a mirror. The girls’ arms are forced above their heads, strained into branches in terrible positions.
    I hate this dress , I say, plucking at the hem.
    You’ll hate being a tree more, says the one who almost got away. I can tell by the shape of her branches. It’s like she’s running in air.
    They say I have to find someone who will look at me, someone who is willing to see what happened to me.
    Someone who loves you, says one. Someone brave enough to learn what happened.
    Then you’ll be free, says the youngest. Not trapped like us.
    My parents? I