“Where is Reece?” she asked.

“He’s helping his mom today,” Huck said.

Baby was calling for food again.

“Want me to help you find something to feed her?” Jackie asked.

“Yes.”

Huck sat on the stream bank. “I’m not staying long, Jackie,” he said.

His mood wasn’t as nice as last time. But that was okay. She was used to that with Mama.

“He’s kind of mad about coming here,” Jackie whispered near Raven’s ear as they walked.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess because Reece or one of his other friends isn’t here. He kept saying you wouldn’t be here, but I had a feeling you would be.”

Raven smiled. Her Asking had made him feel that. She had thought of Jackie most when she did the Asking, so it made sense that he was the one who felt it strongly.

They fed Baby a crane fly, a few crickets, and a caterpillar. While the bird slept, they sat on a log. They could see Huck lying on his back next to the stream, but they were out of his hearing.

“How far from here is your house?” Jackie asked.

“It’s far, but not very far.”

“We can’t see it from the road when we drive past your place.”

He got quiet and twisted the bark off a stick. She had a feeling she was supposed to talk, but she didn’t know what to say.

After a little while, he said, “Yesterday when we drove past your gate, I asked my mom if she’d ever seen your house. She said no, but she’d heard it was really nice.” He looked at her. “I don’t know how she knew that. Maybe the people who built it said that. People around here talk.”

Raven had never thought about the people around there. Not until she met the boys.

“My mom said your mom tore down the old house that was here,” he said. “You wouldn’t remember that because you were a baby. You lived in a trailer she brought in while the house was built.”

“What’s a trailer?”

“A house you can move.”

She tried to imagine that.

He threw down the stick he’d been peeling. “My parents are divorced like yours are,” he said.

“I looked up that word in our dictionary,” she said.

“Divorced?”

She nodded. “What do you mean by it?”

“You don’t know? I thought your mom was divorced?”

She was afraid to say anything about Mama’s divorce from the outside world.

“It means your mom and dad split up. They don’t live with each other anymore. Didn’t your mom tell you where your dad went?”

She couldn’t say anything about that. She shook her head to say no.

“Do you ever see him?”

Even if she had permission to say, the question was impossible to answer. She saw ravens almost every day, but those birds were not her father. They were an embodiment of her father, Mama said. She still didn’t understand that word.

He took her silence as a no. “I never see my dad either. He quit coming around when I was little. I don’t even remember him.”

An idea popped into her mind. Was it possible Jackie and Huck were born of earth spirits? Was that why they also lived in that place and had no father in their house?

“Do you know anything about your father?” she asked.

“No. My mom doesn’t like to talk about him. Huck doesn’t either.”

“What does your father look like?”

He thought about that. “Like Huck, sort of.”

Raven looked a little like her father. Dark eyes and hair. Her skin had taken some color from him, too, Mama said.

“How do you know what your father looks like?” she asked.

“From pictures. Didn’t your mom keep any pictures of your dad?”

She shook her head.

“She must be really mad at him.”

Raven supposed Jackie wasn’t the son of an earth spirit if he had pictures of his father and Huck looked like him. But the idea had been nice. She wished she could talk to another person like her.

Jackie got off the log. “Do you want to see something cool?”

He’d used the word cool before, and she was pretty sure it didn’t mean cold.

As they walked back to the stream, he said, “It’s more funny than cool, I guess.”

Huck stood as Jackie stepped into the stream. “Where are you going?”

“To show her the Wolfsbane,” Jackie said. “Your boots will get wet,” he told Raven. “You need shoes to walk in this stream. The rocks are killer on bare feet.”

She knew that and didn’t care if her boots got wet. They got soaked with dew every morning anyway. She wondered what the “wolfsbane” was.

Huck followed them into the creek. “What if she tells her mom?” he asked.

“She won’t,” Jackie said.

“It’s on her property.”

Jackie stopped walking and looked at Raven. “You won’t tell your mom, will you?”

“No,” she said.

“Did you tell her about us swimming in your creek?” Huck asked.

“No.”

“You see?” Jackie said to his brother.