The familiar rivers and trees gave way to the red expanse of rocks and dust, and an orange moon glided silently alongside our Honda.
       "Mommy, why is the moon following us?" I asked from the back seat.
       Daddy snorted. "Leave your mother alone, Rain. She doesn't feel well."
       "Why?" I asked.
       "It's something a child can't understand," he said.
       My mother turned in the peeling passenger's seat to regard me, her big, dark blue eyes sending streams down her face.
       "The moon is watching over us, Rain," she said, her voice thick and soft, like a blanket. "To make sure we're okay. You can always trust the moon and follow it when you need to find your way."
       Daddy snorted again and rolled down the window. The hot, dry air rushed in, and my mother shuddered. She retreated into her seat, pulling her long, slender legs up to her chest. Daddy lit a cigarette, and the rest of the ride was silent.
       

       I learned the secrets of our new desert home. I knew where the rattlesnakes sunned themselves, and the scorpions kept cool. I knew there was a little cave near the cliff that blew cool air and sang damp songs in the baking noon.
       Mom spent hours in the shower every day. Daddy had tiled it with river rocks, and she'd press herself to the floor as the cool water ran over her. Dad yelled about wasting water, but as soon as he'd go to work, she'd shower. Sometimes I would sit with her, but it was boring. I'd rather listen to the cave sing. Sometimes I would sing back.
       Mom retreated to the bedroom just before Dad came home from work. She sat by the big picture window and watched the sun sink over the horizon while her skin shriveled in the dry heat. It had begun to flake off like a pastry.
       Mom hated the desert. She wanted to go back to our old home, where she swam in the rivers. Dad didn't want her near the rivers. Something had happened. No one would tell me what.
       "You're a child, Rain. You don't need to know this stuff."
       I thought I was supposed to learn, but Dad said it like an accusation. Like I couldn't know anything until I was a grownup.
       When the water bubbled up from the cave, I had to show Mom to make her happy again.
       She didn't want to leave the shower until she had to. She always looked like she wanted to cry, but she didn't anymore. Not since we drove to the desert. Maybe she just didn't have enough water left in her to cry. But I pleaded, and she followed me.
       She withered under the glaring desert sun. Her sandpaper dry hand in mine felt as frail as old bird bones, but before we even reached the spring, Mom sniffed at the air.
       "Here, " I whispered, tugging her to where cold, clear water bubbled up. Already the little trickle had dug a path through the dust toward the cliff.
       Mom stumbled to the spring and plunged both her hands into the cold water, burying them up to her elbows and taking a deep breath.
       "It's too small," she whispered. "But it's here. And maybe it will grow?"
       She looked at me, questioning, and I nodded because I really wanted it to grow into a river for her.
       Mom took a long drink. Then she jolted up, looking around her like a deer sensing a nearby wolf. Finding no danger, she settled back again. "Don't tell your father," she said.
       "No, Mommy." I shook my head. I understood. Daddy took us away from the rivers.
       "When the moon says it's time, we'll come here together," Mom said, her hands suddenly strong and cool in mine.
       "Yes, Mommy," I said. And I meant it. I really did, but even as I lay beside the spring each day while she showered, coaxing the water to rise, I didn't know what leaving meant.

       I met Summer when I started kindergarten. We were fast friends on the dusty playground as we crawled through the thickets of hot iron bars and under waterfalls of burning plastic sliding boards. We hung from vine swings, even when they chafed our little hands, and we told stories about fairies and princesses.
       When Mom woke me in the middle of the night to a bright, full moon, all I thought was that I would never see Summer again.
       I had kept our secret from Dad, who would yell at her and hold her arm too tight when we went out into town, but I hadn't thought it would be so soon. I hadn't realized it would take me away from Summer.
       When I saw her, the raspberry stain of a bruise feathering across her white face, I knew she was going to leave forever.
       "No, Mommy," I said. "I'm supposed to play with Summer tomorrow."
       "Sweet Rain," she whispered. "We can't stay here any longer. I'm afraid."
       "Grownups aren't ever afraid."
       She wept, tugging me, begging me to leave. I thought she would give up, give me another month, another year. I didn't understand what it meant for my mother to stay with my father. I didn't know that she understood that my childhood friendship meant as much to me in that moment as her happiness, and she didn't blame me for it.
       But she didn't intend to leave me.
       She never intended to leave me.
       She picked me up, carried me out of the sprawling rancher, down the hill and toward the gurgling rush of the stream that now cascaded over the side of the cliff. It had widened and deepened so much that I knew if we lay on our backs, we'd both be submerged, and she would take me away forever. I knew because she tried before, in the city, in the river, before Dad caught us and dragged us to the desert.
       This time I wasn't willing to go.
       I screamed aloud. The lights went on in the house. My father ran out with a shotgun. "Lara! Come back now!"
       My mother stumbled, trembling, and I squirmed violently from her arms and scrambled away.
       "Rain, no! Come with me!" she cried.
       My father shot the gun into the air. I screamed, and my mother sprang toward the water. "Follow the moon. She'll watch you 'til you come," she called as she disappeared into the darkness. My father grabbed my arm and dragged me to my feet.
       "Where is she?" he shouted, holding his rifle close to me. His face twisted with fury. I realized that if he caught her, he might kill her. And it was all my fault. I wailed, and he tossed me back into the dust and ran toward the water.
       I pressed my tears into the dirt, and I hoped I gave her enough time to get away. There was a rumble in the earth.
       "You can't leave, Lara!" Dad shouted into the night. "You're my wife!"
       The water whispered to me, and I wept back. A heavy rock slipped under the earth, a reverberation so slight only I felt it. Stone and gravel fell in around it.
       The water stopped.
       All my father found was a wet mud bed where a creek once ran.
       There was no sign of my mother.
       

       I lost Summer for a time anyway. After my mother disappeared, my father took me away. We flew back to the city where we used to live. We boated down rivers and swam along the banks. Then we went overseas.
       One time, on an abandoned street in Italy, Dad pushed me into the swirling river and then cried out for help. I was never in danger. I found it easy to swim with the rushing currents, but my father and two big men jumped in to save me after a mile downstream.
       After a year of searching, Dad brought me back home, but I wasn't allowed to go to Summer's to play or join any clubs. Most of all, I was not allowed to leave the house when the moon was full. He hired a sitter to stay with me when I was home from school. He told me that I had to follow all the rules because I was his daughter. But he bought me nice clothes and took me out once a week for ice cream. He gave me pretty dolls and hair bows.
       He ripped the river rock out of the shower. Nothing remained of the river in our desert home.
       

       Dad didn't tell me about Janet until she moved in.
       "She's your new mom. You need a mom," he said when the lean, tan, young woman went to get her bags.
       "Are you guys, like, going to get married?"
       "That's grownup business," he said.
       "What if I don't like her?" I asked.
       "You're my child," he said. "You'll do what I tell you to do."
       Janet cooked, cleaned and drove a car. All things my mother never did. She didn't like me.
       "You have the most unsettling eyes I've ever seen, Rainy," she said one day. My dad was still at work, and Janet smoked a cigarette in the kitchen, reading beauty magazines. Behind her hung a large portrait of my mother, staring off over a lake, her black hair blowing like a dark halo. Janet sneered at me. "Like a cow's eyes, big and senseless, just waiting for someone to eat them."
       "Eat their eyes?" I asked, raising my bushy black brow in the way I knew made her crazy. She hated my "manly" eyebrows that I wouldn't let her pluck.
       "No." Janet huffed a cloud of smoke. "Eat the cow. You look like you're waiting for someone to eat you."
       I snorted. I was only ten, but I knew "eat me" didn't just apply to food. I didn't know more than that, but the insinuation made Janet go red in the face.
       "You should be nicer to me, Rainy," she said. "I'm the one who takes care of you and your Daddy, after all the shit your mother put him through."
       "And you who still doesn't have a ring for it!" I said. I knew where to land a blow that hurt, where the nerves were raw and throbbing.
       There were fights when my dad got home. After that, I was allowed to go over to Summer's house again.
       

       Dad and Janet fought about getting married a lot.
       "I'm almost thirty, John! I'd like to have kids of my own someday, you know!"
       "Jesus, Janet, you can't even stand Rain. Why have more?"
       "You treat her like a pet, John! Always putting her in the best clothes, taking her around town like she's your little princess. But she's crazy! Like her mother!"
       "Oh, here we go," he said.
       "You still have pictures of her up all over the house, John! How am I supposed to feel?"
       Janet left Dad a few times. He didn't seem to miss her much, but she would always come back, crying on our doorstep, apologizing.
       I don't know what she had to be sorry for. Dad was awful to her.
       He still showed people pictures of Mom. "My first wife," he would say proudly. "She died when my daughter was little."
       His eyes shone when he displayed her wild beauty to co-workers and acquaintances in town, when he pushed me out in front of them, proof that she had belonged to him and he still kept her greatest prize. Janet would shrink away behind us, diminished against the awe of our audience for the woman who left us.
       I wasn't asked to be in their wedding. "Janet wants her sisters to be bridesmaids and her niece to be the flower girl," Dad said.
       "I'm not a child. I don't want to be a flower girl," I said.
       "You're still a child," he said. "A grownup would know when to keep her mouth shut."
       "I want Summer to come," I said. "I'll keep quiet if Summer can come."
       It worked out for everyone.
       While Janet's family got trashed beneath gaudy paper streamers, Summer and I swiped a bottle of champagne and got tipsy behind the banquette hall in the hot night.
       We were BFFs, sharing a love of independent movies, inside jokes, and feminist literature--but something was changing. Summer had gotten her period the year before, and she was curving, swelling, and becoming more beautiful every day. Boys noticed. I noticed.
       I remained willowy, pale, and strange, with my cow's eyes and manly eyebrows and unruly hair. I would look at pictures of my mother, and I see I resembled her, but it was like the pieces of her were glued together by my father, sloppy, awkward, and angular.
       "Did you hear about Mr. Corathander's ranch?" Summer asked, twisting a strand of my hair back behind my ear. "He was digging a trench, and he hit a spring or something. A big lake's forming."
       "A lake? In the desert?" I asked.
       "I swear," she said. "I like your makeup. Did you do it yourself?"
        "Janet's sister did it."
       "Well, it looks pretty." She shrugged and sipped the warm champagne.
       "Will you show me, sometime, how you do yours?" I asked. My face felt hot, with the booze or the heat or something else.
       "Yeah, I mean, I dunno much. But I'd love to make you up sometime."
       She brushed her freckled fingers over my face, and I suddenly felt chilly. I looked up into her green eyes. She looked back at me. Nothing happened that night. But I think we knew then.
       I think I forgot my mother then.
       

       I almost backed out of swim team tryouts. I heard the jeers from the seniors. "Is it raining in here?"
       "Is it trying out for the boys' team?"
       I burned with humiliation and hate for my stupid body, which refused to curve, remaining long and skinny. At fifteen, I still hadn't gotten my period, and I stood frozen on the starting block, my stupid suit revealing all my failings, unsure if I should dive or run.
       Summer came up beside me and took my hand. "Fuck 'em," she whispered.
       "Your girlfriend wishing you luck?" someone shouted. Summer gave them the finger. It was so effortless for her to be brave. She was beautiful, bright, desired. But I couldn't let her down.
       I dove. And I beat the school record. Later I beat the state record. No one mocked me anymore.
       Dad came to my meets sometimes. He never cheered, but he soaked in the praise from the other parents, and he showed them pictures of my mom. Janet never came. She was undergoing fertility treatments, and she hated me more than ever. We avoided each other, and that worked out well for us, but my dad's sudden interest in my life baffled me a bit.
       One night after a meet, as the moon followed us home, I broke the silence in the car.
       "If we win regionals, we'll go to the capital."
       "Where are regionals?" Dad asked.
       "Up north in--"
       "No." He rolled down the window and lit a cigarette.
       I smiled, unsure what he meant. "The trip will be chaperoned, and it's covered by fundraising we--"
       "Rain, you're a child. You're not leaving home for a week."
       "I'm fifteen. And we're going to compete. My team needs me. I set the--"
       "You need me to sign a permission slip?" he asked.
       "Yes, but--"
       "Well, I won't. You're too young."
       We hadn't left the desert since we'd searched for my mom. I didn't remember anything but desert.
       We went to the desert mall. We went all over the state for meets. But the whole state was desert.
       "I have to go!" I said. "Everyone on the team is going. Their parents are letting them."
       "You're my child, and you aren't leaving." The way he said "my" had a strange weight to it. Like I was a car he didn't want to lend out.
       When we got home, I stormed into my room and slammed the door.
       Janet shouted until midnight, furious Dad wouldn't get me out of her life for a week. "We could use that time to make a baby of our own!"
       "She is my own," he said. "My child, and I'm not letting her get away too."
       My team, my coach, and my Summer were all devastated the next day when I told them I couldn't be at regionals. I'd let them all down.
       Then I came home to Janet crying on the couch, holding another negative pregnancy test. I tried to slip past her, but she called, "Rainy!"
       I continued into my room.
       Janet burst in, her pretty face contorted into a swollen scowl. "I called you."
       "Are you okay?" I asked.
       "No. I'm not okay! I live with an ungrateful brat who hates me!"
       "I don't hate you, Janet. I--"
       "Mom! You were supposed to call me Mom!" she screamed. "I remember when I came here to take care of you and John after the mess that woman left, and John told you I was your new mom. But you never called me that. And you never even liked me."
       "I-- I'm sorry," I said. She wasn't wrong, but I could feel the pain emanating off her, and I felt bad for it.
       "You're not sorry. You and John act like she was some kind of a goddess. She was a crazy bitch! She tried to drown you in a river when you were four years old, and you still want her over me. And I can't even get John to fuck me on my fertile days so I can have a baby who loves me!"
       I felt a wave of icy water crash down upon me in the desert heat. Drown me in the river? No. My mother and I, we swam, we played in the river near our house in the city. That one day, she'd said I was old enough to go with her and...
       Janet had stopped screaming and stared at me, her eyes wide, tears leaving pale tracks down her tanned cheeks. "Oh, you didn't know?" she hissed. Then she grinned. "Didn't know your Daddy dragged you two out of the river and saved your life? Didn't know why he moved to the desert where there were no rivers for your Mommy to kill you in? And then your Mommy left. She's probably bobbing around at the bottom of a lake now."
       "Get out," I said in a voice that offered no room to argue.
       Janet stumbled back, her expression melting into fear. "Rainy, listen--"
       "Get out!" I screamed, and Janet fled my room.
       Something sprung loose within me.
       Somewhere in the desert, a pile of rocks slid away, and a misty song leaked into the dry heat.
       

       Summer found me sitting by a sunbaked pile of rubble where, as a child, I imagined a creek had sprung. I had avoided her, my teammates, everyone for the last month of school after they returned from regionals, defeated.
       "Is this what you're going to do all summer?" she asked.
       I shrugged.
       "Everyone knows your dad wouldn't let you come," Summer said. "No one's mad."
       "It doesn't matter," I said.
       Summer knelt down beside me and took my hand. "It matters to me. Why are you avoiding me?"
       "My mom was mentally ill," I said. "I thought she was magic."
        "If she was mentally ill, your dad should have got her help," Summer said. "Not locked her away in the middle of the desert with a little girl to care for."
       "It doesn't matter," I said.
       "Quit saying that," Summer wrapped her warm freckled arms around me and kissed my temple. "It matters. C'mon. I got something to show you."
       "I'm supposed to stay on the property," I said. "My dad said."
       "Do you think Janet will tell him if you leave?" Summer asked.
       She drove me down the empty roads to Mr. Corathander's ranch, around his cattle pens, to the giant, blue lake growing in the middle of his property.
       The air was fresh and damp, and I breathed deep as we got out of the car. "Are we allowed to be here?"
       "My mom does his taxes," Summer said. "I asked him if he minded if we practiced swimming over the summer. He said to invite the whole team, but I wanted to bring you first. I guess I should have told you to bring a suit."
       I ran right for the water's blue and beckoning waves and dove in. Deep. Deeper than I had ever swum before, feeling the natural waters of the earth envelop me. Something opened wide within me and took them in as I swam down to the rocky bottom of the lake.
       When I emerged, Summer screamed. "Jesus Christ, Rain! I thought you had drowned! How did you hold your breath for so long?"
       I don't think I had held my breath.
       When I got home that night, there was blood in my underwear. My period had started.
       

       I didn't kiss Summer, really kiss Summer, until the day after the first day of our senior year. We swam laps in Mr. Corathander's lake, which now hosted a lush thicket of greenery all around it, like the ones we used to imagine we were playing in as children. Our whole town was turning green from sprouting young trees along the creek that now ran beside Bloomer's Road, to the spreading ferns along the boggy patch behind the town's only strip mall, to the grassy patches of wildflowers that were popping up all over our one-horse town. Water was rising in the desert.
       Summer and I bobbed on the top of Corathander's Lake, our fingers brushing under the water as the sun baked our skin. My skin still glared white, while Summer's freckles had merged after a long hot summer into a dark tan. Her sunset hair flowed around her head like fire, and I gazed into her green eyes and saw an eternity there.
       "I love you, you know," she said.
       "I love you too," I replied.
       "Not just as a friend," she said. "I think you know that."
       So, I kissed her. And it was perfect. Her mouth was soft and sweet and warm, and my body burned for her, but the water cooled it down.
       The water cooled me down.
       At school, we were a couple. Only a few shitheads tried to start trouble.
       "You're so strong," Summer said after I pushed a guy from our class against his locker and made him apologize for calling us bitches. Boys were jealous of me for being with Summer. They were also jealous of Summer for being with me. At last, my resemblance to my mother was more than just passing.
       I swam every day. Even without Summer. Even when everyone said it was too cold for Corathander's lake and practiced in the school pool, I went to the lake.
       I went in the late autumn. I went in the winter. When the moon was full, I would wake up and take Janet's convertible out to the ranch and swim laps or just settle down at the bottom of the lake and think.
       I could smell water when I walked outside of my house. On the ten-acre property, the cave where I once imagined a creek was nine acres in. But I didn't look, couldn't look. It would mean something I wasn't ready for yet.
       I had Summer. My girlfriend. My best friend. My everything.
       Janet walked in on us kissing in my room one day after school. She screamed and called my dad.
        "You like this girl," he said like he had never heard of her before.
       "I love her," I said, pulling my shoulder back. I had become less willowy in the last year. My arms were strong and toned. I had curves and swells but also lean muscle.
       "Okay." Dad shrugged. "You love her. That's good. Stay away from boys. You'll be sticking around then."
       He lit up a cigarette and walked away as Janet glared.
       "John!" she cried.
       "Did you make dinner tonight?" he asked her.
       When we made regionals again, Dad told me I could go. "You're going to room with Summer?" he asked.
       "Yes," I replied.
       "Okay. Go win the title,"he said.
       It made Janet crazy. It made my senior year almost perfect. Summer and I spent our time together, swimming, studying, kissing, and planning our future.
       We dominated in swim. I broke my own records. College scouts were calling my house about scholarships.
       Summer was staying in state for college, and my Dad suggested I go to school with her. "I'll cover any expenses as long as you're home for holidays and some weekends."
       It was all perfect.
       "Rain, what happened to your mother?" Summer asked one evening as we floated around Corathander's lake.
       Then it was not perfect.
       "She was sick," I said. "I know that now."
       "Sometimes you go underwater, and your down there for more than five minutes," Summer said, trying to wrap her fingers around mine, which stiffened up.
       "I can hold my breath for a long time," I said.
       "You're never breathless when you come up," she said. "Sometimes, you go right back down. You seem like you're breathing down there."
       I laughed. That was ridiculous.
       "Tell me about when your mom left. Tell me about what you remember."
       "I was a child," I said. "I don't remember anything."
       "I know you remember this. You told me when we were little. A creek sprung up in your yard."
       "It was just a fantasy," I said.
       "Please, Rain." She kissed my cheeks, my mouth, my shoulders. "Please tell me."
       I dove under the black water, away from her questions. I settled on the bottom of the lake and looked back up at Summer, floating against the light of the bright full moon.
       I did not need to go back up. Not now, now ever. The water ran through me, recharged me. I felt fully alive down here in the mud.
       Above me, Summer began to thrash. I shot up, caught her and swam with her to the bank of the lake.
       "You were down there too long, Rain," she said as I carried her out of the lake. "I was worried. You worry me. But you... you always pop up. Like a fairy or a nymph."
       "You're being stupid," I said.
       "Don't," she said. "Don't be mean because you don't want to talk to me. That's not you. That's not how we deal with each other."
       She was right. She was right about everything. I was not normal. So I told her what I remembered about my mother. About the city with the rivers, the stream on our property. About how I had fought my mother because I didn't want to leave Summer.
       Then we fell asleep together in the back of her pickup truck.
       

       Summer and I hiked out to the cave with a tent and sleeping bags, and a bottle of cheap wine for my birthday.
       The water was flowing. It was not a creek but a river, wider and wilder than when my mother disappeared into it. It called me in voices I knew in my soul.
       "When she left, the moon was full," I said. "She said it followed me to keep an eye on me. Isn't that silly?"
       "Rain." Summer took my hand. "There is a river running across your yard. Our tiny desert town is full of water. I don't think anything is silly anymore."
       "It doesn't matter," I said. "I love you. We have our whole lives before us."
       She bit her beautiful lip and shook her head. "I think when the moon is full, you need to follow this river." She started to cry, and I collected her into my arms.
       She sniffed. "You need to find your mother, to find yourself."
        "All I want is you!" I said.
       "And I want you to be who you are."

       "Happy birthday, adult! Get a job!" Janet tossed a little cake on the kitchen counter. It was a rare kindness from her. Deep lines had carved themselves around her mouth and eyes. Her leathery skin was stretched taut over her boney arms. The desert was drying her out, like it had my mother, just slower.
       I went outside and stood over my dad on the back porch. "I'd like to know how you met Mom."
       A big, orange moon shimmered on the horizon in the direction of the river.
       "That's a grownup story."
       "I am a grownup now, Dad. By law, at least."
       He put a cigarette in his mouth and flicked the lighter. A cool gust of wind blew in from the backyard, and the flame went out. He tried again, this time catching the cigarette for a moment. The ember fizzled and died like the tobacco was damp. At last, his eyes rolled up to mine, and he seemed to see me for the first time, standing over him.
       "You look just like her now. For a while, you were an ugly little thing; I couldn't be sure."
       "Tell me." My voice was stronger, stranger than ever before. Everything was changing now.
        "She was sitting on the side of a river in a little town where I was stationed. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I couldn't think of anything else but her. I tried to talk to her every day, but she would just jump into the water.
       "The local men knew about her. 'Grab her and make love to her. When your child is within her, she will be yours'."
       "No!" I felt a nauseous pit in my stomach.
       "That's how these things are done, with women like that. She bewitched me, and I had to have her. I never thought she would leave you."
       "She didn't leave me!" I cried. "She left you!"
       "She came home with me willingly. She was happy."
       "You know nothing about what she wanted. You took her away from the water!"
       "Because she tried to drown you in the river!"
       "Because she tried to escape you."
       "And take you! My child! Mine! But she left you too, and you'll stay with me. You can go to State College with your girlfriend, and no men will ever...."
       "You don't know about me, either. I'm your consolation prize. Your proof that you kept her, once."
       "You're my child and--"
       "I'm not a child. And I never belonged to you."
       "I took good care of you. Kept you in good clothes, and you finally got beautiful after all those years. People tell me all the time--"
       I stood up. "Goodbye, Dad."
       "I'm getting you a car to take to college."
        "There's a river in our backyard."
       "Right." He snorted.
       I left him behind and walked toward the moon.
       He didn't follow me. I was only a child, after all. He thought I had no feelings, no ideas, no goals that he didn't allow me.
       Summer waited at the river, which rushed over the ledge and through the desert valley below.
       "Don't." She held up her hand as I approached with arguments. "You can talk me out of saying goodbye, but I want you to leave. I love you too much to keep you where you don't belong. Just kiss me and tell me you are going to look for her."
       We held each other for a long while as the moon rose high, large and full and silver from the flat desert horizon. "I can't go," I said, although my feet were already in the water, and I could feel it pulling me, the moon singing the way.
       Summer retreated. "Goodbye." She wept.
       Before I could reach out to her, the river took me. It pulled me away from my home, away from my father, away from Summer. "Sit by every river you find," I called as I rushed toward the ledge. I didn't know if she heard, but I thought she would do it anyway.
       I slid over the cliff like a ribbon of silk, down the waterfall and splashed in a spray of foam at the pool beneath. The water embraced me, held me tight, urged me on, and the moon beckoned to the end of the river, illuminating the way out of the desert.
       

       Here we sing our water songs. We sing to ancient depths never touched by mortal hands. We sing to the rocks and the mud that have never known what it is to be dry. We abandon our perches when our songs draw men near. We don't sing for them. We sing because our hearts rejoice, wild and free like the birds and the wind and the moon and the waves.
       But there is someone near now, moving slowly through the thick vines that shelter our sunny patch of river. Her motions are careful, gentle, and reverent. The others slide into the water and hide beneath the twisting currents. I feel their panic, scratching at my pale skin, but I remain. There is something familiar in the sunset color of her hair, the splatter of freckles beneath her green eyes.
       Her face is changed. Thinner, stronger, older. But still so beautiful my cool heart warms.
       Yes, I know you. You will not hold me down and make me yours. You have found me at last.