Helen was frantic. It wasn't as if she hadn't lost a child before; she'd had those moments in stores or at theme parks where one of the girls would wander off or separate herself. Those were horrible moments, when a mother's mind went to all the places no mother's mind should go. Thoughts of shadow-faced strangers guiding her daughter to some secret place to molest her plagued Helen the moment she realized the girl was gone, which was too long after she and Danielle and Anjulie had exited the building. The women had been mesmerized by the more immediate drama of flames beginning to eat at the inside of the house, but the moment Helen remembered to look for Juniper and realized she wasn't there, she turned on Anjulie.

"Where's Junie?"

Anjulie was drawing her phone from her ear; she appeared not to hear Helen, just stared at her.

"My daughter? Where is she?"

They both looked about, but the small yard very obviously contained zero children.

"You brought her out, didn't you?" Helen's fingers went up into her hair, pulled at it. Firelight reflected in her eyes as she gazed in horror at the lower windows of the house, which showed the glow kindling within. "Oh God, Anjulie! Did you leave her inside?"

"No! No Helen—I swear—I swear to God I watched her go out the door with the baby!"

"Could she have gone back in?"

Danielle approached. "Come on," she said, oblivious to her peers' conversation. "I just called 9-1-1. The fire department will be here soon. We have to get our story straight."

"Your baby is missing!" Helen practically screamed. "And Junie! Where are they? Anjulie—"

"I don't know, Helen! I'm sorry! She—they—"

Gripping each woman's upper arm, Danielle shook hard. Darkness had settled around them, but the growing incandescence within the house painted their faces in hellish light. "Forget about that! We've got to get it together! Remember, it's the ferrets, all right?"

"But your baby could be inside!"

Danielle sharply twisted Helen toward her. "And what if she is?" Some unidentifiable emotion rippled through Danielle, her face contorting as she worked up to the decision to add, "I'd be a shit mother, anyway. Maybe it's the best thing for her."

Enraged, Helen tore her arm from Danielle's grasp. She looked desperately from one woman to the other, but the one's diffidence and the other's bewilderment infuriated her. The woman shook her head more out of shock than to answer any questions, and then she turned and hurried across the patio and to the back door. Anjulie called after her, but Helen paid no attention. The flames were visible through the windows, but they hadn't taken over the entire house. If Junie and Evangeline were inside, Helen was sure she could find them before it all tumbled down around her. Shoving in the door, the woman put first a hand and then the collar of her shirt over her mouth and nose; the smell of smoke was overwhelming already. And the heat—the worst summer August couldn't match the boiling temperature within.

But the girls . . . she had to find the girls.

She tried to scream her daughter's name, but inhaling enough breath to get the words out was nearly impossible. Helen pushed through that back den and into a hallway to the left of the kitchen, as the counters and stovetop were alight with dancing flames. Sheets of wallpaper in the distant living room, the room where they'd lit and toppled the candles, were peeling downward in great curls, and the sound of it all—more like rushing water than sweeping fire—drowned Helen's feeble attempts at communication.

Then, as she reached the stairs that ascended to the second floor near the front door, a strange phenomena took effect. The vast waving tongues of flame suddenly slowed, moved as seaweed undulating beneath the ocean, and falling objects and bits of wall tumbled in stop motion. Helen stood in awe as she watched a clock on the burning mantlepiece slip from its place and move erratically toward the ground, though after half a minute it'd gone only a few inches. What was going on? The woman raised a hand to her face and fluttered her fingers: they were not slowed. Her body moved in normal time; her heart beat its steady panicked rhythm. Nothing about herself was delayed, and yet the inferno around her blazed at a funeral pace.

Whatever it is, it's a blessing, Helen thought. It'd give her time to find Junie.

She raced up the creaking stairs. While the upper rooms had yet to fall prey to the fire, they were filled with smoke, and though the clouds had also slowed enough to stand still, Helen was forced to waft through them. She could see little, but through the lethargic growling and moaning of the flames below, Helen thought she heard laughter—a girl's laughter! "Junie!" she cried, and she ran toward a room that she thought used to be Danielle's.

Pushing open the door and shifting black clouds, Helen quickly scanned what she could make out of the room, but all she saw were strange objects, things that looked like cat towers and cages and bowls. This was no longer a bedroom, and there were no people in it. Her eyes ran across the closet, and the woman stumbled toward it, tripping on the obnoxious tubes and rings scattered all over the floor. If Junie wasn't in there, then what was the point of all this, of the world slowing itself for her, of time and space bending to assuage her maternal terror?

The first thing Helen saw when she tore open the door fooled her, and she half-cried in joy before realizing it was only her reflection looking back. A sob caught in Helen, one not just of dismay but also of anger, and yet, she couldn't pull away.

That mirror: it transformed her image into a revenant of herself not as she was but as an adolescent, her teenaged version in all its mediocrity. Helen could hardly understand what she saw, for a moment, but then her mind seemed to catch up with her reflection, and there she was again, fat, frumpy Helen. Not the heaviest in her grade (small consolation) but bigger than the others by far, not just in width but in height. Oh, she hated this self, this terrible ugliness she'd managed to forget for so long . . . and yet had she ever quite escaped it? Did anyone at all escape what they'd once been? How could she, when the intensity of her self-loathing at such a formative time had consumed her day and night, in waking and in dreaming? Helen had never understood why she'd been made this way. She'd always pretended to be good, to believe in a loving and reasonable God, to be more devoted than the others—it had been the one thing she had going for her. But though she'd grown, found a man who'd married her and at least seemed to love her, had children far more beautiful than she'd ever been (except for poor Juniper, perhaps, who'd always struggle with her mother's genetics), she'd wandered from that version of herself, the one that fabricated belief in some greater power having a plan for everyone, loving His creations equally, offering fairness and justice for all.

No merciful, compassionate God would put vulnerable children through such pain.

Helen raised quivering fingers to her plump cheeks. How round her face was, how soft. Not like the pretty, defined angles of Joanna's or the confident square of Danielle's, certainly not like the adorable doe-ishness of Emily's.

How she hated herself!

Her fingertips pushed, pressed against her cheekbones, began to scratch. She'd done this before. It wasn't new to her. She could do it again, and she deserved it. Oh, she'd been happy enough just to be included, just to avoid being shunned, and yet she'd known they were unkind girls. She'd been part of it, part of their cruelty because she'd been too cowardly to stand up to it, too afraid they'd turn on her. She was ugly, through and through.

Her flesh tore, the whitish-pink meat beneath catching beneath her scraping fingernails. The pain of it was real, this time, no illusion, and when she was done with her face, Helen moved to her throat, compelled by such extreme disappointment in herself, such loathing of her flaws both within and without—the years between what she'd been and who she now was were nothing. What was growing up? The arbitrary passage of time, when all that was gained was an ability to fool oneself into thinking change was possible, that one could become a different being, could leave one's adolescent self behind. But Helen knew more deeply than she'd cared to admit that neither she nor anyone else could escape any former iterations. People didn't change. They were and remained what they'd always been, born into selves they'd eventually die as. Any other assumption was self-delusion.

A wavering, pearlescent form appeared in the mirror behind Helen's weeping, shredded face. She paused in clawing at her breast, her torn shirt hanging loose around her mutilated neck and shoulders, and a terrible sob welled up inside of her.

"No—oh no. Please . . ." Water streamed from her reddish eyes, the salt of her tears stinging the open wounds on her cheeks. "I've known all along. I've known it was you."

She turned, slowly, and saw what she knew she'd see: the glowing, ethereal figure of the friend she'd once known, gleaming like a gloworm amidst the blackish smoke. Even in the horribleness of that moment, even as Emily stood naked and eyeless before her, Helen absurdly envied the girl's slender figure, her weightlessness, the straight shine of her hair.

The woman backed into the closet so quickly she cracked the mirror behind her, but that didn't stop her from sliding to the floor, trying to cover her face though peering through her bloody fingers as if watching a horror film and trying to anticipate the disturbing bits.

"I didn't mean to," she whimpered. "It wasn't what I wanted. It was always Danielle and Joanna! They m-made me do it. They—they told me what to—and I—"

If the pale apparition heard Helen, she made no sign of it, instead began to flicker, either because the smoke was obscuring her or because she was fading back into her own misted past. Whichever it was, Helen frantically crawled from the closet, seized by a desire to follow, to stay with Emily, to make sure her old friend knew she was sorry for that night and for all the other unspoken jealousies. But the figure moved too quickly for her to reach it, one moment before her, the next at the door. And the smoke had begun to swirl naturally, again, to fill Helen's lungs and make her cough. Every inhalation burned; every exhalation strained the lacerations in her throat; every movement was painful, and yet the woman rose and stumbled from the room, calling out the girl's name, her own daughter forgotten.

Down the stairs, back toward the roaring flames, following the luminescent figure she was sure was ever just out of reach, Helen moved as if in a nightmare, incautious of the falling bits and spreading blaze around her. She was losing that whitish streak in the raging conflagration, and she had no idea where exactly she was, anymore. Everything looked the same, and even had she wanted to find a door, she wouldn't have been able to. Heat seared Helen's lungs, her flesh. Her clothing—had she begun to burn as well? Was she turning into flame? Charring and crumbling into ash? Fitting, she thought deliriously, that Emily had frozen and she would burn.

But then a huge, hulking black form emerged from the smoke and fire before her, and terror seized the woman. Through the roaring, she was sure it mocked her, heard it laugh, "Look at the fat, ugly thing, here! She's not worth saving."

"Unlovable, unfuckable—I've never seen something so disgusting," claimed another black figure, solidifying at her side.

"Tried to get rid of the ugly," the first said, "but no one could scratch that deep."

Helen fought the two firemen as they took hold of her, was still fighting them as they pulled her from the burning house, as she looked back toward the flames and saw the figure of Emily standing in a blown-out window, a grin all the way to her ears splitting her face in half, hovering wickedly beneath the hollows where her adorable eyes had once been been.