I’m not sure what wakes me. Maybe it’s the low thrum of the diesel engine vibrating the walls, or the cold cone of light that spills across my ceiling at two in the morning. Whatever it is, it pulls me toward the window, groggy-eyed and yawning.

I part the blinds, expecting to see some grumbling semi driver clunking another mobile home into place, some down on their luck family kicking at the red trailer-park dirt as their moving truck arrives but instead, I see her. She climbs from the truck gingerly—toeing the ground like it’s a thin sheet of ice, first one foot, then the other—easing from the seat with a quick glance up at the streetlight. Her eyes are encased in a heart-shaped face, her features delicate with an upturned nose centered over a chin that looks carved from glass. Something about her reminds me of the porcelain dolls Mom keeps stashed on the top shelf of her closet, the ones trimmed in lace with the skin glazed and shining.

A heavy thunk! pulls my gaze to the driver’s side door. A man stands there, huge, with a pair of meat-slab arms and a bald head glittering with sweat. He stares at the trailer for a long moment, then spits and works toward the back of the truck to retrieve a blanket, one he spreads carefully above the girl like he thinks the streetlight will give her a sunburn before shoving her roughly toward the door.

A slow-rising heat fills my chest. I know his type: the kind of guy who posts up on the porch with a forty and a fat wad of chew stuffed in his lower lip, ready to have a go at his kids or his wife just for looking at him wrong. Light his fuse and watch him explode. Dad was that kind of guy before he abandoned me and Mom to the trailer park. It never took much.

I watch them disappear into the trailer with my breath fogging the glass. Something about the girl bothers me. The slack expression and the downcast eyes, the way she wrapped her arms around her chest like maybe even breathing was too much work. It made me want to rush outside and give her a hug, to tell her everything would be okay. And that’s what it is, I decide, identifying the thing bothering me: I’ve never seen someone so sad before.

#

I’m up early the next morning and catch her dad, or whoever he is, hanging blackout curtains in the windows. A thick beard crawls up his neck, one I imagine to be teeming with cockroaches and beetles and various other sorts of shelled insects. His eyes are crooked, buried too close to the bridge of his nose, and his cheeks are lumpy, like maybe whatever god put him together had a few too many drinks beforehand. His gaze twitches up and down as he works—glazed, one eyelid stretched wider than the other.

When I grow tired of watching him, I close the blinds and wander into the kitchen for breakfast. Mom is humming and swaying in front of a frying pan, eggs sizzling, wearing the threadbare purple robe Dad gave her two Christmases ago, her hair up in curlers.

I sit down and trace my finger over an ancient syrup stain on the checkered tablecloth. “We have new neighbors.”

“Oh, yeah? Who’s that?”

“Some girl and her dad.”

She spins around. “A girl, huh? Your age?”

“I think so.”

She arches an eyebrow and gives me a half-smile.

“What?” I ask, feigning confusion. Valley Acres isn’t exactly teeming with teenagers, especially girls. Mostly it’s a bunch of elementary kids playing in the dirt until their parents can afford a better school district.

“Well, then,” she says, “we better make them some cookies, don’t you think?”

#

I carry the tin over around noon, waving at our nosy neighbor, Mrs. Amblin, as I cross the street. She waves back from her lawn chair, a vodka tonic already sprouting from her sun-damaged hand. She treats the trailer park like it’s a soap opera (which, to be fair, it mostly is), hoping to catch a neighborhood argument or two, or an affair if she’s lucky, anything she can use to pass the time and fill her gossip jar.

I can feel her gaze crawling over the back of my neck as I amble up the steps of the girl’s trailer, hesitating for a moment when I spot the light fixture. It’s been blacked out, glazed in a thick coat of paint, a few hasty splotches splattered and dripped down the door frame. I stare at the mess, confused, then knock once, twice, three times before the bolt clicks, and the door inches open.

“What’cha want?” a voice says with all the warmth of a growl.

“Hi, I, uh . . . my name’s Kyle. I brought you guys these.” I raise the cookies. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”

My smile comes out as a quick twitch of the lips before the door widens and the man steps out. He’s even bigger up close, his gut leaking over a pair of worn jean shorts, a greasy handprint smeared across the thigh. He says nothing, only stares down at me with his mud-colored eyes and his arms crossed. I think he’s going to tell me to screw off, to beat it, but instead, he reaches out with a meaty palm to snatch the tin.

“You live around here, kid?”

“Just across the street,” I say, my gaze drifting behind him into the dim interior. I see her there, the girl, buried in a pool of shadow. Her hand flutters up in a wave, and I raise my hand to return the gesture, but the man steps back inside with a half-mumbled thanks, and slams the door shut before I can.

“Hah!” Mrs. Amblin calls from across the street. “Guess they won’t be coming to any neighborhood barbeques!”

I roll my eyes at her, annoyed but hopeful, because I’m pretty sure the girl smiled at me before the door closed.

#

A few nights later, I sneak back across the street with a handful of pebbles and toss one at the window I think is hers. I’m coiled behind the hedgerow, ready to run if it’s not, but on my fourth try, the curtains part, and I exhale as she peeks through. I stand and raise a hand, feeling stupid, like I’m in one of Mom’s cheesy romantic comedies, the idiot kid waving up at the girl from the lawn—except in this version I’m pretty sure the girl’s dad would kill me.

She cracks her window, her face framed by an oil slick of dark hair. “What are you doing?”

“I um, never got your name. From the other day.”

Her eyes narrow. “I never gave it.”

“Yeah. Sorry . . . it’s just—”

“Winter.”

“Huh?”

“My name is Winter.”

Winter. Beautiful. It fits. “I’m Kyle.”

“I know. I heard.”

“Oh . . . right.” Idiot.

The corners of her lips curl higher, and I can’t help but notice her skin is the color of moonlight.

“So,” I say, trying to recover, “me and some friends are heading up to the lake in the morning. You wanna tag along and meet a few of the other kids around here?”

She blinks, her smile wilting. “I…can’t.”

“Why not?”

“My Dad-he won’t—”

A pair of headlights flash over my shoulder and send her scurrying into the black of her room. She reappears a moment after they pass, her face tight, her gaze ticking over the road behind me. “I just can’t. I gotta go. My dad might hear us. Thanks for the cookies, though.”

“Wait. You maybe want to talk again sometime? Like this?”

Her forehead tightens, and she pulls a slice of cheek between her teeth with a tentative nod. “Sure, I’d like that. Tomorrow. But wait until eleven, okay? My dad is usually passed out by then.”

With that, she disappears, and I float back to my trailer helium-happy, struggling to focus on anything other than my rapidly beating heart.

#

The day passes like quicksand. I skip the lake and help Mom patch a hole in the drywall the size of Dad’s fist, another memory of him sanded away. Good riddance. If only it were always so easy—a bit of sandpaper and some elbow grease, so she could forget him forever. But I know she can’t. His shadow is buried in the curve of her once-broken nose and the way she flinches at sudden sounds, like he might leap out of the closet at any minute, fists bared.

Bastard.

I hope he stays gone forever. If he doesn’t, I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t like to think about it. All I know is I’ll never let him hurt Mom again. Ever.

#

After dinner, I kill a few hours playing some Atari and then tick off the rest watching the hour hand circle the clock in my room. When it hits eleven, I slip through the living room past Mom, who’s snoring away in front of some late-night talk show, and make my way outside and across the street. Winter is waiting for me this time, her window sliding open at my approach.

“Hey,” she says softly.

“Hi,” I reply, my palms already sweating. “So, we—” I nod toward her Dad’s room. “Are we uh, good?”

She tucks a glossy lock of hair behind her ear. “Yeah. He’s asleep.”

A warm buzz runs through me. We have time...

“So, where you from?” I ask.

The answer is Stockbridge, Massachusetts, her fifth move in the last four years. She likes Indie music and fried pickles and wants to travel to Alaska someday to see the glaciers and the humpbacks.

I tell her a little about myself. How I can’t wait to graduate and move to Austin to start a career in computer programming, do anything other than work in the oil fields like Dad did before he left.

I talk about him a little, too, the next night. Tell her how he chased some greasy-haired waitress to Houston and how me and Mom are better off with him gone. Stuff I would never tell anyone else, but for some reason just seems to slip out around her.

She does the same, fills me in on how her mom died of cancer when she was five and how she inherited her mother’s allergy to the sun. It has something to do with ultraviolet light; it’s the reason her dad won’t let her out of the trailer because she’ll burn in seconds. She says he cares, that he always does what’s best for her, but the way her mouth tightens when she talks about him gives me doubts.

On the fourth night, she waves me closer with a playful flip of her wrist. “Hey, you wanna see something cool?”

I nod and edge through the shrubs toward her window, my skin buzzing when I draw close.

She fades into her room and swirls back after flipping on a small lamp near her bed. Scarlet light bleeds through the lampshade, painting the walls in a mix of crimson-pink tones. Her room is bare, save a few posters tacked here and there, one of a mare tossing its mane, and another of Yosemite’s Half Dome at sunrise.

“Watch this,” she says, raising her hands. She laces her fingers together, and a shadow spreads over her door. It’s a bird, something a kindergartner would draw in art class. But then she flutters her fingers and the shadow grows, transforming into a lush set of wings followed by a bloom of tailfeathers and a beak.

She curves her arms, hands flapping, and the shadow flies—actually flies—across her ceiling, the motion so fluid, so lifelike, I almost expect it to burst through her window.

Then, without warning, the shadow rips down over her wall straight toward me.

I stumble back and trip over a row of flowerpots at my feet. Several crash to the rocks. Winter flashes me an Oh, God look, her eyes snapping wide as a door smacks open down the hall.

“Go,” she hisses, whipping the curtains shut. I dive into the hedges instead. I don’t have time to run, her old man would hear me for sure. He barrels into her room, his voice angry and dripping sleep.

“The hell’s going on in here? Why’s the window open?”

Winter says nothing, and I imagine his concrete gaze surveying the walls, the floor, looking for something off, something not quite right. I hear her curtains tear open a second later, and I try to still my breathing despite the swarm of mosquitoes ravaging my neck. I twitch as one bites, and I’m sure he’s seen me, is about to jump over the windowsill and snap my neck, when Winter speaks.

“I was hot. I needed some air.”

Silence. Then: “And the pots?”

“I heard a cat. It—”

She’s cut off by the unmistakable sound of a slap, flesh-on-flesh, followed by a sharp cry.

I cringe and ball my fists in my lap. Hard. Asshole.

“You’re lying,” he says, fury creeping into his voice. “Don’t you lie to me.”

“No, no. I promise. It was—”

“It’s that boy, ain’t it? The one that came by the other day. Don’t think I didn’t catch the way you were lookin’ at him.”

“N-no Dad. I-I swear I wasn’t—

“Bullshit.”

The window slams down, and all I can do is sit there trembling with rage, thinking, I will kill you if you touch her again. I will kill you, I will kill you, I will kill you.

#

He boards up her window in the morning.

The sharp tack of nails in plywood wakes me, and I slump over to the blinds with my scalp prickling, wondering what the hell is going on. He’s out there banging away as if what he’s doing is as normal as picking weeds. I widen the blinds to get a better view, and the hammer stops mid-stroke, hangs there.

When he turns, his eyes are flat and black, like those of a trout’s. A toothpick juts from the corner of his mouth. He stares at me, unflinching, until a wave of nausea twists through my gut.

I glance down, unable to hold his gaze. When I look back again, he’s gone.

#

“She’s in trouble,” I tell Mom at breakfast.

“Who?”

“The girl. Winter. Her dad’s not right.”

She pushes back from the table and reaches for the crumpled pack of Camel Lights on the counter, shakes one loose and plants it between her lips. Lights it. “Hmm. How so?”

“He boarded her window. We need to do something.”

She takes a deep drag, the tip burning cherry red. “Now, Kyle, you know we can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“‘Cause it’s none of our business, is it?” She grabs her plate and stands, apparently done with the conversation. “Now help me clean up.”

And there it is—the broken piece of her—the piece that kept Dad around long after she should have cut him loose.

I grab my plate and toss it in the sink, my fork clattering to the floor. She spins on me, voice sharp. “Kyle, what’s gotten into…”

But I’m already gone, storming back to my room.

#

It doesn’t take long to figure out his pattern.

Out of the trailer at seven-thirty, dressed in his faded-orange construction gear, tool belt strapped tight beneath his gut. Home by five.

I watch him for a couple days to make sure—gone at seven-thirty, home by five—before I decide to go over. The guy is punctual, if nothing else.

Outside, the sky is cloudy, the air so thick with moisture, it feels like I’m walking through a bowl of chowder soup. Mrs. Amblin is already stretched out on her lawn chair, wearing a massive floppy sunhat and reading an old People magazine, a set of over-sized sunglasses perched on the bridge of her nose. She pulls them down as I pass, flashing me her red lipstick smile, the one that says: I’m watching...always watching.

I wave at her—nothing to see here—and bound up Winter’s steps.

She answers on the fourth knock, the door cracking open with a stale whiff of air. “Hey,” she says, toeing a fringe of the orange shag spilling over the threshold.

“Hi, you maybe want to—”

The words die on my tongue when I spot the swamp of purple devouring her eye.

“He did this?”

She nods.

“Winter...”

Her eyes harden. “He was right to. There are things about me…us…you don’t know.”

“I know a father shouldn’t hit his daughter.” I say it with more force than I intend, the anger in my voice setting her back a step.

She eyes me like she sees something new, like maybe I’d hit her too, if she makes me mad enough*.*

“Look...I gotta go, Kyle,” she says, moving to close the door. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

“Wait,” I say, planting a hand against the wood, “Are you talking about the bird? Because that was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” I’m not lying. It’s all I’ve thought about the last few days, how the hell she did it—the rush of feathers and that liquid-smooth motion as it flew across the wall.

Her face lights up, a pale sunrise, like that first warm glow of the day when everything is bursting with promise.

I take a chance and grab her hand—the first time I’ve touched her, her palm cool against mine—and tug her toward the door.

“What are you doing?” she asks, not really resisting.

“Let’s go to the park for a bit. It’s right down the street.”

She looks skyward with a hard swallow. “I can’t. The sun, it—”

“Won’t do anything.” I swing up the umbrella I brought, Mom’s white and yellow-striped one. “And besides, it’s cloudy today. No sun, see?” I step aside for her to look out, which she does with a quick glance up at the bank of clouds foaming overhead.

“I don’t know...”

“C’mon,” I plead, “when’s the last time you had some fun?”

“It’s been...a while.”

I give her my best puppy-dog eyes and curl my hands over my chest like a set of paws. “P-p-please.”

She giggles and blows at her bangs with a sigh. “Yeah, okay. But only for a few minutes.”

#

The park is busier than I’ve seen in ages, the playground buzzing with kids. Moms fringe the sides and chat in clusters of twos and threes. Dogs wheel over the grass, chasing after brightly colored frisbees. A group of knobby-kneed sixth-graders enthusiastically smash into each other, playing flag football.

I lead Winter away from all the chaos, and we sit on a bench nestled next to a birch tree. It takes a good five minutes for her shoulders to unclench and five more before she stops glancing up at the sky like she half-expects to catch fire.

Then she’s staring at me with those dazzling blue eyes of hers. They’re, clearer out here in the light, brighter, with little flecks of green that swim through her irises like glitter.

“Thanks,” she says. “I needed this.” Her hand slips into mine and my heart beats a little faster.

“I figured.”

We stay like that, hand-in-hand, quiet, listening to the leaves rustle with the breeze, while I work up the courage to ask her the question that’s been bothering me since she moved in. When I finally do, my voice nearly cracks.

“Are you...okay? I mean, with your Dad and all?”

She blinks, sighs. “He means well. He’s a little overprotective after what happened to Mom.”

“With the cancer?”

Her eyebrows arch like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about, then settle quickly back into place. “Cancer? Yeah-I mean, sort of, but it’s more than that, it’s...”

She rubs her arms and glances around like she just realized she was outside “I-I can’t talk about it. I…should go. I’m sorry, Kyle, this was a mistake. I’m not safe for you.”

My mouth unhinges. Not safe for you? I’m about to apologize and tell her I overstepped when a football thumps down near the bench. A boy runs up to retrieve it, his cheeks puffing red beneath a pile of rice-colored hair.

“Sorry,” he says, bending to grab it. “We were just...” He trails off, his eyes flicking first at Winter, then at me, his mouth agape.

“Wh-what is that?” he asks, pointing at Winter’s feet.

It takes me a moment to see what he does: Winter’s shadow rippling in the grass, moving like the surface of a pond disturbed by a rock. I blink at it and rub my eyes.

It’s still there when I open them, wavering, expanding across the turf like an anorexic version of Winter. The arms are unnaturally long, the fingertips wire-thin and quivering.

She gasps and stumbles back, tripping as she does. The umbrella flies from her hand and her shadow writhes in the sudden spray of light, the umbra boiling as tongues of flame spark around its edges.

It’s then I realize the sun has burned through the clouds.

The shadow’s arm slithers through the grass toward the boy and wraps around his ankle. A flurry of thin-bone fingers curl over his shin and slide up his thigh. His mouth peels open in a shriek a second before he rips past me backward through the grass toward the shadow’s jaw.

“Help me! Help me!”

I dive for his hand and seize a handful of his shirt instead.

He jerks to a stop, and I struggle to hold on as my forearm rivers with veins. The boy’s eyes bulge, the stitches of his sleeve tearing one by one, snick, snick, snick, and then he’s gone, catapulting across the turf toward the thing’s mouth. His feet dissolve first, followed by his legs and waist. I lie in the grass stupefied, watching his DNA unravel, strand by strand, until all that’s left of him is a vertically splayed hand sinking lower, turning to a fine carbon mist.

“Run, Kyle! Run!”

Winter’s voice cuts through the fog in my brain like an electric current.

I jerk upright and lurch forward a step, slamming back down again as searing heat bleeds through my ankle

I roll over to see Winter scrambling for the umbrella, but she can’t gain any traction, the shadow somehow anchoring her in place.

My hands tear out chunks of grass as the shadow drags me closer, my fingers digging desperate trenches through the soil, slivers of dirt carving beneath my fingernails, panic surging up my throat. My foot nears its maw and plunges in.

The pain is incredible, like being dunked into a pot of boiling water so hot it feels cold.

Sparks flicker through vision, and I almost pass out.

A blur of motion cuts in front of me toward Winter, a figure with tree-trunk arms carrying a blanket. His eyes are close-set, his bald head shining in the sun

The pressure in my calf releases, and I look down to...nothing, no foot, no shin, just a pile of charred, oozing flesh and bits of ash drifting higher, spinning toward a quickly blurring sky.

#

The police question me in the hospital a week after I wake. They grill me until a nurse orders them out with a snide, “That’s enough. He’s in no shape for this.”

It isn’t until I’m discharged that they drag me downtown for a second round: No, officer, I don’t know what happened to the girl or her father. No, sorry, I have no clue as to their last name—I wish I did. Yes, the boy dissolved into a shadow, same as my leg...

In the end, I guess they have too many corresponding witness accounts, too many strange descriptions of what happened, to charge me with the boy’s disappearance, or anyone else for that matter. All they have are a bunch of nonsensical statements, and a grief-stricken mother in search of answers that will never come.

I know because I want them myself.

The letter arrives six months later. I’m out on the porch, sipping a tall glass of lemonade, when the mailman spots me. He glances at my stub knee, then the envelope in his hand, and brings it up the steps. “I think this is for you,” he says, handing it to me with a look I’ve grown accustomed to: a blend of pity and relief. Pity for me. Relief it isn’t him.

I hold the letter in my hands as he shambles away, the envelope wrinkled, the address—Kyle Carrington, 11080 Swallow Way—smudged in spots, like whoever had written it had been crying. I carefully slit the crease with trembling fingers and pull out the piece of paper folded inside.

Kyle,

It’s hard for me to write this. After what I did to you, to that boy...there are no words. Nothing I can say or do will fix things.

All I know is you made me happy, and all I did was hurt you.

It’s all I’ve ever done, really...hurt the people I love.

My mom. My dad. You...

He saved you, you know, my dad did. He brought you to the hospital after that old woman across the street told him where we'd gone.

I read the rest of it, my eyes pouring over every word, every letter, my stomach sinking, and then go to my bedroom and pull the blinds shut. A foul shiver swims up my arms and stitches back down my spine. Winter’s letter swims through my brain. That...thing in the park changed me. I’ve suspected it for a while now, the way my shadow wavers and curls in the sun, the motion unnatural, like it’s moving on its own. And indoors, how it slides over the walls like a flicker of smoke when touched by the lamplight.

I close my eyes and let the last line crash through my head like a thunderstorm.

Kyle, I’m so sorry, but whatever you do, you must never, ever go outside.