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once. I saw Ian’s feet pass. I waited. Five…four…three…two…
    “Ha! Gotcha!” Ian bent down and saw me, crouched under the porch, where I was defenseless.
    He had his acorn poised and ready to throw, but he didn’t.
    “I knew you were there all the time,” Ian said. He emptied the rest of his ammunition onto the ground and headed inside for dinner.
    “Just as long as you know I’m the best,” he said. Sometimes Ian came just close enough to being nice to me that I could see some potential.

Chapter 10
    Monday morning I woke before my alarm even went off. I dressed fast, ate, and went outside wearing my brand-new, beautiful coat. Ready to go to school. All ready. However, I was now twenty-two minutes early for the bus.
    I was so early that it was still dark out. I followed the little path my dad cut in the tall grass toward the water. I looked at my watch. Twenty-one minutes to go. I walked a little farther. Darkness sat so deeply on the river that everything was the same color—the sky, the ground, and the slow-moving Wallkill. It felt like the sun would not be able to rise up and lift it away.
    I stood with my feet tipped down toward the water. My heels were dug into the steep wall of mud, and that was the only thing that kept me from slipping into the river. A cold wind came across the valley and whipped my hair across my face. It got caught in my mouth and stung my eyes. I usually wore my hair back so tightly that a tornado couldn’t blow a strand out of place. But on our way out of the department store Friday, Cleo had insisted on buying me these two barrettes. They sparkled with pink-and-blue-and-yellow light. They were small crystal-butterfly barrettes. One for each side of my head, perched just above my temples—butterflies alighting for a brief rest before taking off in flight. That’s how Cleo described them, anyway.
    “Well, try wearing your hair down,” Cleo had said when I told her I didn’t wear barrettes.
    I wear a ponytail, always. But she bought them for me anyway, for some possible me I couldn’t see. In the store I was hopeful, but here and now I anticipated these barrettes having the same fate as the skirt my grandfather had bought me.
    Now I watched the murky river. Trees on the opposite bank struggled to stay part of the land. They leaned dangerously over the passing river. Huge roots stuck out from the bank, like giant hands reaching for something to grab onto as the dirt they stood on was drained away.
    George told us that the river pulls soil from the far side of its path and drops sediment on the other, and so it slowly creates bends and turns as it travels on its way. But slowly, ever so slowly. It took thousands of years to make this Wallkill River Valley; to flatten the land by meandering back and forth. Thousands of years, going nowhere, just wearing away at the same piece of land until it was flat, until it was a valley.
    I reached up and touched my hair, to touch the barrettes, to pull the hair from my face. My hair had doubled in size, and it blew around my head, out of my control. I slipped one butterfly from my hair and then the other. I bent down in the wet mud, careful not to get it on my new coat. With a strong stick I started digging.
    When the hole looked big enough I dropped the two barrettes in and quickly covered them up. Still kneeling beside the burial spot, I pulled my hair back with one hand and flipped a hair tie around it with the other. I tugged it all into a tight ponytail.
    I was me again. The old me, the one I was used to.
    I saw my bus in the far distance across the flats, just rounding the corner by the Johnsons’ farm. If I ran I would just make it.

Chapter 11
    After almost a whole week wearing my new coat, it didn’t feel new anymore. Taylor didn’t feel new anymore, either. We were friends. We claimed the very end of one table in the cafeteria for ourselves.
    “Do you think this weekend you could sleep over at my house?” Taylor asked me.