I gave Trey a little while to process his mother's coldness toward him, but when we had lumbered nearly the entire distance back to town, I had to interrupt his shoegazing with some realness. "We need to figure out how to get ourselves back to Arkadelphia by six if we want to catch a train that will put us back on our way to California."

Retracing our steps along the highway, we'd taken to marching through the back yards of houses instead of walking along the road. We ducked under t-shirts and boxers fluttering on clothes lines, and stepped over Barbie dolls and baseballs that had probably been abandoned at the start of the winter. We glared at dogs who barked at us from behind windows. Traipsing through the property of total strangers was oddly appealing. It felt safe, sort of, to be marching across their lives as if it was just that easy to step out of our nightmarish reality and into the simpler existence of these Gurdon residents. If there were any towering mansions in this town, we hadn't seen them. This did not seem like the kind of town where a girl like Violet Simmons would ever move. It did not seem like the kind of town where little girls died in house fires while their families watched in horror on front lawns.

"Yeah," Trey finally replied, slowing to a stop and turning to face me. He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun and peered north as if considering the walking distance to Arkadelphia.

"Trey, it's like, fifteen miles," I said to discourage whatever he was considering. At my most motivated, fifteen miles would have seemed like a challenging walk. After three nights of restless, paltry sleep and a diet of pure junk since leaving my mother's house in Wisconsin, fifteen miles was a length greater than my imagination could handle. I knew it was possible to walk fifteen miles in an afternoon. It just didn't even seem remotely realistic that we'd make it much further than we already had that day. With each step I took, it felt like the bones held together behind my knee cap were grinding against each other. My heels ached. I never would have thought in my whole life that I'd find myself stranded in rural Arkansas, but there we were.

Trey squatted and rested his elbows on his knees. We had paused in the middle of stretch of grass in between two property lines, overgrown with yellow grass. A rusty weathervane turner atop the house behind me squeaked lazily in the light spring wind. "Any ideas?"

I dug my hands into the pockets of my winter jacket and roamed our surroundings with my eyes. The woods on our left, to the west, appeared to run deep. Somewhere behind all of those trees were the railroad tracks we'd abandoned last night. To the east was the rural highway we'd been following all day, and behind us was the high school we'd just left behind. A church bell startled both of us. I couldn't recall us having passed a church at any point during our explorations in Gurdon, but it rang twelve times, filling the stagnant afternoon with its tinny sound. Its announcement indicated that it was noon and reminded me of home. The copper bell in the steeple of St. Monica's used to interrupt my study hall every day when I still attended school in Weeping Willow. I didn't realize until that moment how much I missed my former daily routine in Wisconsin.

"Maybe we should head back toward town," I suggested.

As if the sound had beckoned us, we crossed the train tracks and headed toward its source as if both of us were in taciturn agreement that the answer to our problem of finding transportation to Arkadelphia would be found at the church. The white point of a steeple appeared over the tops of bare-branched trees that had not yet regained their leaves for spring. We trudged down a residential rural road curling toward it, catching the attention of a haggard-looking cat asleep on the front steps of a house that looked like a strong breeze could blow it to smithereens. When the full church came into view, both of us were surprised to find that it was a new construction, far more modern than any of the houses we'd passed that day.

"This is definitely not what I was expecting," Trey said. The red brick church was enormous, easily twice the size of St. Monica's, with an expansive parking lot. A white mini-bus idled under the carport at its front doors, a trickle of exhaust streaming out of its muffler. Several older women with white hair, one of whom was in a wheelchair, waited in a line to board it. Intrigued and feeling an eerie sense that we were finally-for the first time since fleeing the Amtrak train-exactly where we were meant to be, I took a few more steps forward. There was a marquee sign at the entrance to the parking lot on which magnetic letters announced that today, April 11, there was a senior citizen bingo trip... to Arkadelphia.

"Do you see what I see?" I asked, taking a few more steps down the rural road toward the church. The bus driver had de-boarded the mini-bus to assist the woman in the wheelchair. We could run the distance between where we stood and the where the bus idled in less than a minute, I estimated.

Trey hesitantly replied, "I do. Do you think it's safe to try to talk our way onto a bus with a bunch of old ladies who probably watch the news on television all day?"

His suspicion was plausible, but I couldn't shake the feeling that we had been drawn to this church for a reason. With bated breath I watched the mini-bus swallow the woman in the wheelchair, and another woman wearing a striped shirt boarded after her. The women all seemed to be in high spirits, eager for their big weekday afternoon trip out of town. "Yeah, but. . ." I drifted off. But what? I didn't have an answer. If we didn't hitch a ride on the bus to the bingo trip, then how would we ever get ourselves to Arkadelphia in time to hop the train?

"McKenna." Trey's utterance of my name caught my full attention. He hadn't addressed me by name even once since Laura had cast her spell on me to alter my appearance. "I don't think we should ask them for a ride. It's not like the bus is going to be packed with kids and we'll blend right in. The second we ask that driver for a ride, I'm going to be recognized."

"You're right, you're right," I said unconvincingly, my voice betraying my persistent belief that there had to be some way we could board that bus and ride to Arkadelphia in leisure. My fingertips tingled, making me wish I still had the silver orchid pendant Henry had given me so that I could ask it if the bus would safely get us to the train.

The last woman in line stepped onto the bus, closing our window of opportunity. My breath quickened. There was no good reason to be frustrated with Trey that he hadn't quickly agreed to try to get on the bus with me, but still, my temper was flaring around the edges. We needed to get to California, whatever it was going to require of us.

Sensing that I still hadn't given up on the idea, Trey nudged me in the ribs. "Look." I couldn't tear my eyes off the bus as its engine revved and it slowly rolled forward on the gravel path in front of the church. Trey said again, "Hey. Look."

He was pointing at the ramshackle house we had just passed. Its front porch was heavily littered with crushed beer cans. Stacks of newspaper piled high next to the house's front door. The blinds in the house's windows were drawn but even from the street I could see that they were the cheap plastic kind, and many were bent or broken. It took a second for me to realize that Trey was pointing to the house's garage instead of to the house in general. Its door was raised, and although there was no car parked inside of it, two bicycles hung on the wall.

"What do you think? It doesn't look like anyone's home."

My gaze returned to the bus. Dust rose off the street behind it as it drove away toward the corner, leaving us behind in this tiny town so far from where we needed to be. Trey stood with his hands on his hips with a confused expression on his face, clearly waiting for my reaction to his suggestion about the bikes. Now that the bus had vanished around the corner and released its grip on me, it was obvious that the bicycles were our only hope. There was a man's bike and a woman's bike, and both looked a little rickety.

Fearlessly I walked toward the house, up the driveway, and into the garage to see what kind of condition the bikes were in. The tires on both were severely deflated, and the spokes on the wheels of the women's bike were rusty. I lifted the women's bike off the wall and set it down on the cement floor of the garage, noticing as I walked it forward a few feet that it was a bit wobbly. Still watching me from the street, Trey looked in both directions to make sure the coast was clear before he followed me into the garage. He surveyed a work bench covered in tools and a set of utility shelves. "Knew it," he muttered as he took a bicycle pump off one of the shelves.

Dropping down on one knee, he twisted off the black plastic cap on the valve in front tire of the bike which I held upright. He gave the tire three good pumps of air before crouching down again to try to read numbers printed on the dirty yellow part of the old tire to determine exactly how much air the tire needed. Then he pumped a little more. He next moved on to the back tire.

The men's bike didn't appear to need as much air in the tires. However, after we hopped on the bikes and rode down the driveway at top speed intending to make a clean getaway just in case anyone was home inside the house, the chain on Trey's bike came loose. "Damn it," I heard him say from a few feet behind me. I jammed on the hand brakes and came to an unsteady stop. Trey kicked his bike's rusty kickstand and dashed back into the garage. When he returned, he carried with him a rag and a can of WD40 that he must have found somewhere inside. "Let's get off the road," he said. Without waiting for my response, he lifted his bike by the handle bars and carried it into the trees across the street.

Once we were safely out of view from passing cars (not that there were any), he pulled a strange tool out of his pocket and used it to pop two sections of the bike chain off. "Where'd you learn how to do this?" I asked in amazement as he threaded the chain through the bike's rear gear.

"I've taken Shop like a million times, remember? Could you hold this in place?"

I set my own bike's kickstand and held the two ends of the chain on the men's bike together as Trey had demonstrated. He used the tool he'd presumably boosted from the garage to reset a pin to refasten the chain, working silently with his brow furrowed. He then set about spraying a little WD40 onto the rag and patting it along the chain. "It won't get all the rust off, but it'll have to do," he reasoned. He looked down at his fingertips, which were coated with black grease, and attempted without success to rub them clean on the legs of his jeans.

An hour and what seemed like endless miles of farmland surrounding us later, we rolled on crooked wheels into Arkadelphia, Arkansas. The outskirts of town weren't too impressive. Tractors had been abandoned outside the boarded-up remains of gas stations that looked like they'd gone out of business before I was born. We rode past a mysterious mountain of old black car tires on the side of the road. We passed several pawn shops and a curiously out of place Humane Society. Heads turned and eyes followed us as we made our way into the small town, not because we looked suspicious but probably because it was newsworthy in this community for anyone to cross town boundaries on bikes.

The Amtrak station was set back from the street behind a pleasant park with a gazebo and a few benches. Trey sped ahead of me and I followed him to the gazebo, where he hopped off his bike and let it clatter to the ground. "Look at that," he said, pleased that his plan to steal bikes had paid off. "We made it with plenty of time to spare."

The reluctance Trey had demonstrated over the last few days about making our way west toward California had been replaced with what could have been described as an obsessive focus on getting there. The change in his attitude once we arrived in Arkadelphia was noticeable but I didn't ask him about his sudden shift in priorities. There were no more mentions of Alaska or Canada. He was instead thinking tactically and covering a lot of details that probably would have never occurred to me about the long journey ahead of us.

"We should ride our bikes all the way through town so that people see us. Then we should ditch them and double back here on foot," he said. "That way, if cops have been sniffing around the rail lines looking for us, everyone will remember seeing a couple kids ride past on bikes on their way out of town."

Exactly as Trey proposed, we stopped at a convenience market on the edge of town. I ventured inside alone with Laura's credit card and stocked up on the items that Trey and I had decided would be necessary if we were successful in getting ourselves on a train bound for Texarkana. With any luck at all, we'd spend the next few days on the tracks, so we'd need to bring with us water, food, and probably (unfortunately) toilet paper. Only as I handed the friendly clerk Laura's credit card did I realize woefully that I would have been totally unprepared if I were asked for her billing zip code or ID, since the picture on her Driver's License did not resemble my current physical appearance at all. The clerk didn't seem to notice that I had to steal a peek at the credit card he handed back to me in order to even know which last name to sign on the receipt: Chisholm.

On our walk back toward the park, we planned to avoid the town's busiest streets, but Trey paused in front of a hardware store. "I bet a flashlight will come in handy," he said. "I mean, who know what's going to happen?"

The hardware store, I found, was more of a farming equipment store than any kind of household hardware store I'd ever entered before. I wandered the aisles of bulk fertilizer and tractor accessories trying to put on a brave face as if I knew exactly what I was looking for, but eventually I caught the eye of a beer-bellied stock boy. "Do you need any help, ma'am?"

It was the first time in my life anyone had ever called me ma'am. I wasn't even sure that he was referring to me and looked over my shoulder to see if a middle-aged woman was standing behind me before I replied, while blushing, "Um, yes. Where might I find a flashlight?"

The stock boy motioned for me to follow him and led me halfway across the store. "You new in town?" he asked.

"Yes," I lied. It seemed like it might sound weird to tell this stranger that I was just passing through but needed a flashlight.

"Figured," he said, stopping in front of a rack of dusty flashlights and offering me a goofy, self-conscious grin. "You look like you're not from around here. Sound like it, too."

I reached for a red flashlight, eager suddenly to pay and get out of there. "Yeah. I'm from Illinois." The stock boy had no reason to suspect I was lying but I still didn't like how his eyes traced the details of my body as I paid in cash. My whole life I'd wasted a lot of energy on wanting to be pretty. Never would I have expected that attractiveness would be such a burden.

Trey and I each carried a plastic bag of my purchases back to the park near the Amtrak station. After we tucked into the cheese and peanut butter crackers I'd bought in the gazebo, we agreed to try to get a little sleep prior to following the tracks to where they split into a train yard. We figured a freight train carrying cargo was more likely to stop there than at the Amtrak passenger station, and we planned to find a place in that area we could lurk until we had an opportunity to somehow board the train.

Once we stretched out on the benches inside the gazebo, it would have been impossible for anyone driving past the park to have seen us. In that respect, it was the safest place we'd come across in three days straight for us to catch a few hours of shuteye. Trey began lightly snoring on the bench across from me fewer than ten minutes after I set the alarm on my phone to wake us up an hour before the train was scheduled to pull into town. But I stared upward at the peaked ceiling of the gazebo feeling too tired and achy to even sleep. I longed to insert my earbuds into my ears and ask Candace to reassure me that everything we were doing was for the best. However, I resisted the urge because I knew it might be a long time before I'd be able to recharge my iPod. There was probably going to come a time when I would really need its battery power.

With my eyes closed, I tried to visualize my bedroom at home in Weeping Willow. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't relax enough to even become sleepy. I didn't look like myself, and now I was starting to not feel like myself. The most disorienting aspect of the last three days was the way in which Trey was treating me, like a total stranger for whom he had little affinity. Despite the distance between us over the last few months, I'd come to depend on Trey's love to define my purpose in life. I could suffer through high school with strangers in Tampa knowing that he was back in Wisconsin, waiting for me. I could endure knowing that everyone in my hometown, including my mom and her boyfriend, thought I'd gone off the deep end. Even if we failed in breaking the curse on Mischa and she continued discreetly killing people for the rest of her life, I would at least be able to hide myself far, far away somewhere with Trey and find comfort in the secret that we shared.

However, having him make wisecracks at me in the same tone he previously used to address the teachers he hated at our high school was more hurtful than I dared to let him know. I had no idea what was happening inside his head, and for the first time since we'd gotten close in the fall, I didn't feel comfortable asking. At some point in the days that had passed since he'd intercepted me en route to Florida at the airport, he'd designated me to the enemy team. We were young, of course, so it was reasonable to expect that we would have broken up long before we reached a suitable age for marriage. But such an abrupt withdrawal of his affection completely stunned me. He could be stone cold, and naturally I knew that since I'd observed him treating our other classmates at Weeping Willow High with total indifference since my freshman year. Perhaps it was naïve or pathetically romantic of me, but I'd never, ever imagined that he'd aim his coldness at me.

The sun set around five and the temperature of the air in the park dropped substantially enough to rouse Trey from his deep sleep. I'd already come to realize that there was a motion detector light inside the gazebo, and had been sitting perfectly still on the bench in the dark to keep from triggering it. But as soon as he sat upright the blinding light came back on. If anyone had been driving past the park at that very moment, they would have seen two silhouettes in the gazebo and probably wondered what such knuckleheads were doing outside on a frosty night.

"What time is it?" Trey asked as he rubbed his eyes.

"Probably just about time for us to cross the tracks and figure out how we're going to do this," I said.

In the dim light provided by the Amtrak station, we walked across the train tracks and observed the point at which the track split into two lines. Thirty feet ahead, a third set of tracks appeared. The evening was so immaculately quiet that it was hard to believe a train would roar into this scene in less than an hour. We continued following the tracks until they split into three, and remained on the side farthest from the buildings in town where we could more easily hide ourselves among trees and bushes if police were closely monitoring the movement of trains through this area. Above us, the stars shone in the cloudless sky so brightly that under different circumstances I might have announced, "There's the belt of Orion."

The train's horn faintly sounded as it approached the far side of town miles away. My pulse quickened. Although I'd never imagined before jumping from a train in motion that I'd ever in my lifetime do such a harebrained thing, now I was about to jump onto one. Next to me, Trey paced in a small circle while cracking his knuckles. Hopping a train was a terrifying enough endeavor to even scare a badass like Trey, which made me even more nervous.

Another several minutes passed before our ears detected the chugging of the trains wheels on the tracks. It appeared almost a mile away as it emerged from the trees, and I gulped air. My fingers went ice cold. Anything could happen if I tried to run alongside the train and throw myself into an open freight container. I could be pulled under the train's wheels, lose a limb, or get separated from Trey. Worse, we could never have an opportune moment to jump aboard, and then be stuck in Arkadelphia for who knew how long while we waited for another freight train.

"Here we go," Trey muttered. I recognized the fire in his eyes as the same one that used to burn when he used to mouth off to Coach Stirling back at home. He balled his fists at his side, working up his nerve. Cold sweat poured down my back, saturating my shirt beneath my winter coat.

But then... the train miraculously slowed down. By the time it reached where we were crouching in the bushes, it had slowed nearly to a stop. "Did Candace say that this train was actually going to stop here?" Trey asked.

"No, not specifically," I said. "But I guess it makes sense if it's picking up cargo here or something."

Almost too perfectly, when the train came to a standstill, a rust-colored boxcar with a door that appeared to be open by a few inches was directly across from us. Twenty feet away. We could trot that distance in a matter of seconds and easily climb aboard. Yet neither of us moved. We were paralyzed in the dark night air as possibility crackled around us like static electricity.

"It's a little too weird, right?" Trey finally said. We heard trucks, presumably on the other side of the train. If we waited too long to board the train, we might be seen by the conductor or anyone else loading or unloading cargo. "That it just slowed down just like that? It's like in the movies when a car rolls up at just the right moment, and a door open and a guy says, get in."

I nodded in silent agreement. I'd been getting the sense since Laura helped us escape from Esther's house that something was aiding us in our attempt to get to California. It wasn't likely that the assistance was coming from Olivia or Candace, or even Jennie, for that matter, who might want to see us triumph over Violet. Whatever was trying to make sure we got to California must have had a pretty awful surprise in store for us once we arrived there. The lyrics to "Here Comes Your Man," the classic by the Pixies, sprang into my head. Outside there's a boxcar waiting...

"Do we have any other options?" I asked in a small voice. Henry and Laura would be in California waiting for us in three days.

Trey looked at me with an eyebrow raised suspiciously before advancing toward the train without saying a word. He looked to the left and right down the length of the train as he walked toward the open freight car to make sure no one was watching us. I hesitated for a moment before following him, my feet squishing in the mud that was a result of snow melting earlier that relatively warm day. Up close, it looked a little more difficult to climb aboard the boxcar than it had from where we'd watched the train roll in. The ledge onto which we needed to hoist ourselves was the same height as Trey's chest. Using all of his upper body strength, he jumped and swung his right leg up into the box car. He struggled to pull the rest of his weight onto the train, and when he stood upright, his jeans and the front of his coat were covered in dust.

"Here," I said, handing him the two plastic bags of groceries I'd been carrying.

He set them down inside the boxcar and crouched down, extending his arms toward me to help me. "Come on, I'll give you a hand," he offered.

If I were my normal self, he probably would have been able to pull me up into the boxcar. But in the form that Laura had given me, I imagined I might have weighed more than he could handle. Instead of taking his hands, I pulled myself up into the boxcar the same way he'd entered, acquiring a painful sliver in the palm of my right hand in the process. "Or, do it your way," he muttered at my refusal.

We both looked around the dark boxcar that would serve as our shelter for the next twenty-four hours. It smelled a bit like urine, making it obvious that we weren't the first geniuses to hitch a ride in this particular freight car. Spray paint tags covered the walls. Old light blue moving blankets were piled in one corner, which looked temptingly cozy until it occurred to me that they were probably crawling with body lice or bedbugs from whoever had been crashing in this boxcar before us.

"That's kind of creepy," Trey said, nodding at graffiti on one of the walls. Someone had spray painted a game of hangman on the wall. An illustration of a stick man with X's for eyes had been crudely sprayed over the grammatically incorrect phrase played during the game: It takes one to no one. Next to that, in a different hue of paint, someone had sprayed a baffling equation: 3 = 1.

I walked toward the corner of the boxcar opposite the pile of blankets, and sat down, Indian-style. "Very creepy. I wish we could paint over it." I heard men's voices in the distance, and the opening and closing of metal doors. "Do you think anyone is going to check in here before the train pulls out of the station?" There was nowhere to hide in the empty boxcar except under the blankets, the thought of which made my skin crawl.

Trey sat down next to me and said, "Honestly? I don't think anyone's going to even look."

He was right. The train lurched forward ten minutes later with a jolt, and accelerated to a steady, rhythmic speed. Once my ears became used to the noise pattern of wheels on tracks, I had to admit that riding the rails was kind of exhilarating. We shifted to the middle of the car so that we could stargaze at the crystal clear sky. Despite the increasing evidence that Trey and I were headed straight for danger, the countryside around us-peaceful with the chirping of crickets and lights glowing in the windows of faraway homes-I was calm.

"This is kind of nice, isn't it?" I asked Trey.

"You mean, aside from the stench of urine?" he wisecracked and then immediately became serious. "Yean, it is. It's totally nice."

Trey looked as handsome as ever, his profile illuminated by the silvery moonlight flooding us through the open door of the boxcar. He seemed much farther away from me than a few inches. In fact, as well as I'd come to know him that fall, over the course of just one day it had begun to feel like we were strangers. It hadn't been so long ago that we'd spent every night tightly wrapped around each other, sharing every secret. Those nights when Trey's breath in my ear assured me of my safety were such a distant memory that I wondered if they'd ever really happened. More than anything else in the world on that night in the boxcar, I wanted Trey to turn toward me and kiss me, but I got the distinct feeling that romance was not on his mind.

"What?" he asked softly, noticing that I was staring longingly at the side of his face.

"Nothing," I said, bashfully turning away. With my eyes fixed on the dark horizon I continued, "You're acting strangely toward me. I hardly feel like I know you today."

Trey pulled his knees toward his chest, rocked back and forth a few times and then stroked my cheek with his knuckles. "Sorry. It's just weird, you know? You don't look like you, you don't sound like you, and I guess..."

"What?" I expected him to complete his admission with something along the lines of how he felt like he might be cheating on me if he were to act more tenderly toward me while I looked this way. Or worse, that he just didn't think my current form was very attractive. But I wasn't expecting what he said next.

"I'm not completely sure that you are you."

I blinked hard in surprise. "Um, who else would I be?"

Trey shrugged. "I just don't know. I don't know what's what anymore. Maybe I didn't leave that witch's house with McKenna Brady, you know? Maybe I left with someone who looks totally different and sounds totally different because she is someone totally different. Maybe all these weird coincidences-like being able to board this train so easily-aren't really coincidences at all. They're happening because you're making them happen, or something's making them happen for you."

"Don't you think..." I was at a loss as to how to disprove his theory. How does one go about proving their own identity? The fact of the matter was that I wasn't even really feeling like myself anymore. "Trey. Do you think Candace would have communicated with me on my iPod if I weren't really me? I mean, ask me anything that only I would know. Something about Weeping Willow, or about my sister before she died."

He just shook his head, uninterested in playing trivia games. "I can't think of anything that only the real McKenna would know. And I'm kind of too tired to do detective work right now."

"Trey!" I exclaimed. It felt urgent to resolve his disbelief that I was myself immediately. "I'm really me. You-you were Chewbacca for Halloween when you were in first grade and you took me and Jennie Trick or Treating up and down Martha Road. I didn't like eating lunch at your house because your mom wouldn't cut off the crusts on sandwiches like my mom always did. You got in trouble with the lifeguards at the pool when I was in around fourth grade for smuggling a water gun into the park district."

Mention of the water gun incident at least put a grin on his face. There it was, a momentary glimmer of the real Trey.

"You have to believe me. If you don't believe me, then I don't even know-I don't even know what the point of any of this is. I mean..." I looked up at the full white moon in the night sky. "You're everything, Trey. I want to break this curse because I feel responsible for letting Violet cast it. But not if it means losing you in my life. I love you."