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the kitchen and I’ll make that chocolate?”
    ***
    When Twig’s eyes flashed open, someone was leaning over her. Ghost Boy? He wanted to feed her to the forest. Twig shoved at him. There was a thump and a little yelp.
    A little, girlish yelp.
    Twig blinked the dream out of her head. Casey’s big brown eyes stared up at her from the floor. Twig had knocked her off the bed.
    But Casey bounced right up. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you, but you wouldn’t wake up. Come on. We have to go feed the ponies.”
    Twig was too tired to move, certainly too tired to care about keeping Rain Cloud waiting for his breakfast. She’d been up late listening to Mrs. Murley talk about her first pony when she was a girl, and drinking hot chocolate and nodding.
    Mrs. Murley hadn’t expected Twig to say anything back. Not like her teachers. She’d stopped talking to them when Daddy got deployed. She’d gotten so full of stuff on the inside that she made herself blank on the outside. She’d written “Twig” on the top of her papers and she’d left the rest blank—clean, white spaces; fresh blue lines.
    When the hot chocolate was gone, Twig had lain in bed, drifting in and out of sleep, jolting awake as soon as she nodded off, convinced she’d heard more of that strange horse-howling in the woods.
    Twig sat on the edge of the bed, unmoving, while Casey pulled on jeans and a sweater. Twig had decided her pajama sweats would do. She could hear Mrs. Murley banging around in the kitchen. Getting their breakfast, she hoped. Was she tired too, after being up half the night?
    Was Twig going to have to do this every morning? Were the hungry howls of ghost horses going to haunt her every night? Was Ghost Boy going to stare at her in her nightmares?
    Keely would be here after breakfast. If Twig went with her, she could sleep in the car the whole way home. She could eat Keely’s predictable Mediterranean diet dinners, get woken up by slamming apartment doors and honking horns, and be the same old blank paper Twig.
    She stumbled after Casey and the other girls to the stable. By the time she got there, the doors were wide open and the ponies were nickering their morning greetings. Taylor came running back toward the door, her unzipped jacket flopping as she waved her arms.
    â€œOh!” Taylor gasped, her dark, serious eyes widening. “There’s a horse. A real horse in there.”
    Twig was wide-awake now. Run , she wanted to scream. It’s a ghost horse . But, remembering her cowardice the night before and not wanting to repeat it, she darted between the other girls, under Taylor’s pointing arm, into the stable. What if it had devoured all the ponies and Feather? What if it had decided it liked it there and now it was going to haunt the stable forever?
    She glanced from side to side as she ran, seeing only the curious faces of the ponies poking out of their stalls. Where was the horse?
    As soon as she asked herself the question, Twig knew the answer: Caper’s stall. That’s where she’d have put it if she were Ghost Boy. Sure enough, the back of a white head was visible over Caper’s door. Determined, Twig unlatched it. She took a breath, then flung it open. There was a wild neigh. Then the creature turned toward her, raised its head high, ears pinned back, and began to rear. The horse’s coat was a glaring, surreal white, but the animal itself looked solid, absolutely real. If this creature kicked her, there would be no walking through the blow as if through the mist.
    Twig almost screamed. Almost. But Casey was standing right next to her, mouth open, frozen. And she remembered what Mrs. Murley had said. She had to be calm. She had to be confident. Whether or not it was a ghost horse, it was still a horse of some kind, and she was the idiot who’d opened the stall door, who hadn’t said a word to Mrs. Murley last night. Now it was up to