Halfway across the lake, she thought in a vertiginous stumble: I can never go home or see my family again. The ice was caving in. She leapt to a stable patch, kept leaping, landing on her toes each time. The ice groaned and cracks opened everywhere. She hit the opposite bank just as the people searching for her reached the lake, and then she was running deeper into the tree line. Instinct steered her away from the shopping malls and bypass roads and McMansions and golf courses, and she kept widening the radius of tree cover around her.
Low branches and shrubs tore her skirt, making her fall on her hands a few times, and she sweated so hard she froze all the way through. She grew short of breath, and at last she had to stop running and suck in sharp air. She was glad to breathe again after a day of terrible smells, even if she was going to catch pneumonia.
Patricia climbed a tree and made herself as compact as possible inside the cradle of its uppermost branches. She turned off her phone and yanked out the battery.
What if Laurence was really dead? He was the only crummy person she could stand to talk to, pretty much ever. At the thought of Laurence’s death, she felt a sucking anxiety in her core and a nugget of guilt, like she’d killed him herself.
But she hadn’t. And everything Mr. Rose had ever said to her was full of shit.
Okay. So if Laurence was alive, then he was in trouble. She had to help him somehow.
The sun folded. The air froze, and Patricia kept shivering. She had to make a conscious effort not to let her teeth chatter, in case someone was close enough to hear.
Voices grew louder and quieter. A few times, she spotted a flashlight in the darkness. Once, she heard a dog grumbling, keen to avenge its fallen cousin. She was pretty sure that had been a dog in Mr. Rose’s office. The bastard had probably put it in the crawl space the night before, just to give it time to get good and ripe.
Roberta’s voice startled Patricia out of a half dream. “Hey, Trish. I know you can hear me, so stop screwing around. We all want to go home, and you’re being selfish as usual. I had to blow off Grease practice for this. You’re killing Mom and Dad here.”
Patricia held her breath. She willed herself to give off no body heat, to shrink, to disappear into her tree.
“You never learned the secret,” said Roberta. “How to be a crazy motherfucker and get away with it. Everybody else does it. What, you didn’t think they were all sane, did you? Not a one of them. They’re all crazier than you and me put together. They just know how to fake it. You could too, but you’ve chosen to torture all of us instead. That’s the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can’t stand it when someone else lets their crazy show. It’s like bugs under the skin. We have to destroy you. It’s nothing personal.”
Patricia realized she was crying. Tears were chilling on her face. Fine. She could cry, but she wouldn’t sob. No sound. Laurence needed her help.
“I’m not going to lie to you.” Roberta’s voice was getting closer. She sounded like she was right under Patricia, looking up at her. “You’re not getting out of this one. Nobody’s going to offer you a clean slate. But Mom and Dad deserve closure. Don’t drag this out, for their sake. The sooner they see you crucified like you deserve, the sooner they can start to heal.” The voice was getting smaller again. Patricia risked taking a breath. She started believing that Roberta knew where she was and was just playing with her.
The night misted. Patricia lost track of time. Every now and then, voices approached and then went away. Lights moved in the distance.
Patricia managed to doze off a couple times, then she jerked awake, worried she would make too much noise or fall out of the tree. Her legs, though, had gone to sleep and one of her feet felt like it was the size of a bowling ball. The branch was carving into her back, and the pain drove her insane. And that thought just reminded her of what Roberta had said.
Patricia risked moving just enough to uncramp her legs, and then took off one shoe so she could massage her numb right foot. The shoe slipped off the branch she’d placed it on, and fell through the branches to the ground with a series of rustling thumps.
Two men came near Patricia’s tree, one of them insisting he’d heard something. The second man kept saying it was just the first man’s imagination, or one of the goddamn woodland creatures doing something woody. And then they found the shoe.
“Is it hers?”
“How would I know? Probably.”
“Jesus. I’m missing The Daily Show. So she lost a shoe when she was running around here.”
“I guess. How far do you think she coulda gotten with just one shoe?”
“On this rocky ground? With all this frost? Not far.”
“Okay. Let’s tell the other parties. With any luck, we can be home by midnight.”
A tiny bird landed near Patricia. “Hello,” he chirped. “Hello, hello.”
Patricia shook her head, she couldn’t make a sound. But she was past that now. “Hello,” she said. And thank all the birds in the sky, she sounded like just another bird gossiping.
“Oh. You can speak. I think I heard about you.”
“Really?” Patricia couldn’t help being flattered.
“You’re pretty famous round these parts. So have you decided to start nesting in the trees like a sensible person?”
The bird hopped closer to Patricia, studying her. He was a blue jay or something, with bright streaks on his black wing and pointy blue head, and a white crest. He turned so one poppyseed eye could scrutinize her.
“No,” Patricia said. “I’m hiding. They’re all looking for me. They want to hurt me.”
“Oh. I’ve been there,” the bird said. He tilted his head, then looked at her again. “Hiding in the trees works better if you can fly, I guess. But you’re a witch, right? You can just do a spell and escape.”
“I don’t know how to do anything,” Patricia said. “Just talking to you, like this, is more magic than I’ve done in ages.”
“Oh.” The bird hopped up and down. “Well, you’d better figure something out. There are a lot of your kind on their way here.”
Now that everybody knew where Patricia was, there was no point keeping her phone turned off. She rebooted it, ignoring all the messages, and looked for her only reliable contact.
“Hello, Patricia,” CH@NG3M3 answered. “What’s wrong?”
“How did you know something was wrong?” she texted back.
“You’re using your phone, several miles from home, and it’s late at night.”
“I need help,” she wrote. “I wish you could think for yourself. I feel like you almost can.”
“Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other,” CH@NG3M3 said.
The tiny white rectangle went out. Her phone battery had died.
Patricia was screwed. She could hear them searching, more and more of them, right around her tree. She had to escape now, or the trap would close around her forever.
She had started thinking of CH@NG3M3 as some kind of perverse oracle, so this latest utterance lodged in her head. Because of course, babies are aware of themselves — just not the rest of the world, to any great extent. You can’t have selfhood without an outside world, solipsism is like not even existing. So if Patricia could speak bird, and understand bird, and identify with a bird she’d just met, why couldn’t she be a bird?
“Quickly,” she said to her new friend. “Teach me how to be a bird.”
“Well.” This question stumped the little guy, and he pecked with his dark beak. “I mean, it just comes naturally, doesn’t it? You feel the wind hold you aloft, and you listen for the call of friends, and you scan the ground for morsels, and you flap your wings for all sorts of reasons, like to dry yourself and to lift off the ground and also to express a strong sentiment, and to try and dislodge some nits, and—”