I followed the back road west of town, the one used mainly by farmers driving sheep or riding horses. It was a dirt road, but years of animal droppings made it look paved in cakey hay asphalt, mashed by animal hooves and pickup truck tires. Every once in a while, I’d come across a new pile of crap. Some were huge.

By the time I reached the river, it was almost sunset. The wind picked up, but I couldn’t tell if it was a normal wind or otherwise. I put a hand over my mouth and breathed through my fingers, attempting to keep my head clear.

I had no idea which Mandarin I would encounter that night: happy, angry, somber, or hysterical. I needed to be ready for any of them.

When I arrived, she was standing at the base of the Tombs, dressed in her lavender sweater, with the ridge of her clavicle jutting out over the neckline. It was the first time I’d ever seen her without black eyeliner. She held the jackalope head against her thigh, her fingers wrapped around the antlers. “So this is your place, huh?”

“Someplace magic,” I replied.

She glanced at the spot where she’d besieged Tyler with stones. “I didn’t know,” she said. “I promise.”

I shrugged and turned away, leading her up the boulders to my cave in the Tombs.

Once inside, I sat with my legs crossed. Mandarin didn’t sit right away, though. She circled the space, stooped over, one hand flat on the stone walls. When she reached the cave painting, she paused and looked at it for a long time.

“It’s the Virgin Mary,” I said. “Supposedly. Remember the stories?”

“She isn’t, though.”

“Isn’t what?”

“Mary.”

She sat at last, with her back against the wall, the jackalope head in her lap. The smudgy black eyes of the painted woman peered over her shoulder.

“So why’d you want to meet?” she asked warily.

I cleared my throat. She was going to find out anyway, but I knew I should be the one to tell her. “I told Ms. Ingle you didn’t do a service project.”

Her reaction was right on target.

“But school’s not over till next week!” The jackalope tumbled from her lap. “Why’d you have to go and tell her that?”

“She asked.”

“Why didn’t you lie?” She rose to her knees, but I didn’t budge. “You had no right to do that, Grace. That was our fucking project.”

Any other time, I would have backed down. But not that night. If I’d stood up to Momma after fifteen years, I could handle Mandarin Ramey. “Wrong,” I said. “You couldn’t even choose a topic. My project was helping you out.”

“Well, you didn’t, Grace. You ruined everything!”

“You mean graduating? Are you honestly going to tell me you think you’ll pass every final next week? That’s not my fault. You ruined that for yourself, Mandarin.”

We glared at each other.

And after one, two, three beats, Mandarin dropped her eyes. She picked up the jackalope and set it in her lap facing up. “I know,” she said.

I thought I might feel happy about this tiny victory. I didn’t.

“I just … I don’t know what stops me. Everybody knows I’m screwed up on the outside—all the stuff I do, I mean. They don’t know how I’m screwed up on the inside. Only the people who get close.”

“You solve that easy enough,” I said. “You don’t get close to anybody.”

“Well, you. And I had friends in elementary school too, y’know. Sarah Cooper at the A&W wasn’t all bad. And there was this one girl …”

“Sophie Brawls.”

Mandarin raised her eyebrows. “I guess you heard about the fight. And what happened after. It got so blown out of proportion. Not the fight, I mean—that was huge. For us. But it was ours to settle. When Mr. Beck got involved, and then the cops … Sophie didn’t even try to stop it all from happening.

“And then there’s my mother.…”

She paused, as if to catch her breath.

“We used to make dolls out of cottonwood down. Her and me. We’d cut shapes from old shirts and sew them up. I once heard you can’t truly hate a person until you’ve cared about them. Until you’ve loved them. And boy, do I ever know about that. It happened with Sophie Brawls. It happened with my mother—”

“Why don’t you contact her?” I said, interrupting her, afraid my name was next. “She lives so close. Riverton’s just a few hours away.”

Mandarin snorted. “She abandoned me when I needed her. So now that she wants me, why should I make it easy for her? She deserves to wait.”

I ran my fingers over the gritty surface of the stone floor, thinking about Momma. After the incident that morning, I could no longer deny it: she had tried to reach out to me over the years, in various, mostly misguided ways. But I’d ignored her efforts. I’d wanted to punish her, just like Mandarin did her mother.

“But for how long?” I wondered.

Mandarin shrugged impatiently. “She could make more of an effort than arrowheads. What the fuck’s that about? Like, embracing my maternal heritage?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe it’s about how you’ve hurt each other. They’re weapons, after all.”

“When did you get so damn wise about mother-daughter relationships?”

My turn to shrug.

“That reminds me.” Shifting forward, I reached into my back pocket and withdrew the arrowhead I’d salvaged from the baby pool. “I shouldn’t keep this—it’s not right.”

Mandarin accepted it. She held it up, but there wasn’t enough light to make it glow.

“I don’t want her to know how messed up I am,” she whispered.

And then it all made sense.

Mandarin wasn’t just afraid of failing herself. She didn’t want to fail her mother.

That was what kept her in school. That was why she clung to her hopes of graduating, as impossible as she made it for herself.

I knew her failing wasn’t my fault. It would have taken someone a thousand times stronger to force Mandarin to finish a single math assignment on her own, let alone complete a service project for the community she hated. But even so, my chest ached for her. Like the first time I’d seen her with a man, I wished for the power to destroy whatever monster made her sabotage herself.

If one even existed. Maybe it was Mandarin’s official mythological creature.

“Mandarin …” I hesitated, not knowing what to say. “It’s getting kind of stuffy in here. Want to go out on top?”

When she nodded, I led the way, following a staircase of boulders to my lookout above the Tombs. The river reflected the colors of the sky. It looked like a gulch of molten lava. I heard the high-pitched whoop of night birds in the snarled vegetation bordering both banks. Beside me, Mandarin tapped the head of her jackalope.

“Where do you think those other animal heads went?”

“Maybe they’re tangled up in the tree roots somewhere, or stuck up against a beaver dam. Or maybe they sank.…” I glanced at Mandarin’s face. “But I’m sure they made it. Round the bend to the Missouri River.”

“The Missouri? I thought the Bighorn went into the Colorado River.”

“Apparently the Bighorn flows north,” I explained. “I read it in my history book. That almost never happens—most rivers flow south. It’s actually pretty amazing. So they’d end up in the Atlantic instead of the Pacific. But who cares, right? An ocean’s an ocean.”

Though when I pictured the elk head bobbing out at sea, slapped by waves, it wasn’t a much better image than it being jammed among the other heads in the brush downriver. At least that way it wouldn’t be alone.

“Mandarin,” I began. “There’s something I just don’t get. You say the people here are one of the main reasons you want to escape. If not the only reason. But do you really think people are different outside of Washokey? What if you leave, only to find more of the same? Where’s there to go after that?”

Mandarin stared out at the river.

“Maybe it’s just your way of looking at them,” I added.

“Maybe you’re right.” Her voice shook. “Maybe I can’t be happy anywhere.”

Her tears looked like garnets in the light of the sunset. My heart broke. I closed the space between us, pressing myself up against her, placing my hand atop hers. It felt fragile, like a broken bird. For how strong she could be, how angry, how violent, how manipulative, she could also be the complete opposite. Not just somebody I admired, wanted to be like—but somebody who needed me.

I took a deep breath. Maybe that was my mistake. Because at that moment, the wind increased. I felt my throat capture it, my lungs swell with it.

And all of a sudden, I longed to pretend that nothing had happened. To pretend Mandarin had never betrayed me, and I had never betrayed her back. To pretend that this was one of our spangled, breathless, fucking-gorgeous nights, like the one we spent at the canal, or the one when we liberated the trophies, or even the night of the tri-county pageant, before everything went sour. I needed to hold our magic just a little longer. Whatever it took.

“Mandarin.” I grabbed both her hands. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Away. Let’s leave town. Tonight.”

She shook her head. “You’re crazy.”

“You don’t have to work later, do you? Will anyone miss you?”

She glanced down at our entwined fingers.

“I’m serious, Mandarin! I really want to go this time, I mean it. You can count on me. I haven’t got the modeling pictures back from where I sent the film, but I’ll bring my camera and we can take new ones. On the beach—the beach in California. Or in the strawberry fields. Come and get me at midnight. That’ll give us enough time to pack.”

Despite her tears, I thought I saw the trembling beginnings of a smile.

“Really?”

“Yeah really. We can do this! And not for the people here, but for us. We just made too big of a deal out of it, made it seem harder than it really is. When it’s really just about—”

“Taking that first step,” Mandarin finished.

“Exactly!” I exclaimed. “Look—I’ll wait on my front porch at midnight. With two bowls of strawberry ice cream for the road.” I squeezed her hands more tightly. Her wet eyelashes looked like stars. “Will you go?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding, smiling at last.

Her smile made me want to dance. Maybe I would have if I hadn’t been balanced at the very top of the Tombs, dizzy with adrenaline, the Bighorn River slogging along many feet below. When I stood, the earth appeared to drop another ten feet. “Are you ready to go?”

“I’m going to stay here a bit.” She paused. “Grace?”

I caught my balance at the edge of the boulder before I glanced back.

“Thanks,” Mandarin said. “For everything.”

I noticed she was gripping her mother’s arrowhead. For some strange reason, her words plucked at my spine like a winter chill. But I chose to ignore them.

“So I’ll see you at midnight, all right?” I lowered my feet onto the next rock. “Forget this stupid river. We’re going to see the ocean!”

When I crawled into the cave, I found it almost entirely dark. I’d never stayed out at the Tombs so late. I could barely make out the Virgin Mary, or the nameless Indian mother, or whoever she was.

For a second I paused, squinting at the twin black splotches of her eyes, recalling how I used to consider her the perfect mother. Now, in the dark, she just looked creepy. I had an urge to smear my hand across the stone surface. But I didn’t want some prehistoric Native American curse to thunder down upon me. I scrambled out. The wildwinds thrust against me until my feet hit the ground.