I knew the power of a single wish, after all. Invisible and inevitable in its effect, like a butterfly that beats its wings in one corner of the globe and with that single action changes the weather halfway across the world. Chaos the­ory, my brother had informed me, was based on the mathe­matical theorem that suggests that the tiniest change affects everything, no matter how distant, including the weather. My brother could call it whatever he wanted to; it was just fate to me.

Before I knew it thirteen years had passed at the library, and then fifteen. I still wore my hair the same way — the haircut I’d given myself at the age of eight had become my trademark. People expected certain things of me: assistance, silence, comfort. They had no idea who I was. I dated Jack Lyons for some of that time, if you could call it that. He’d phone me for information, and later that same evening he’d be waiting for me in the parking lot. We’d do it in his car. The sex was hurried and panicked and crazy, but we did it anyway. We took chances. Times when patrons would be arriving, days when there was so much snow, drifts three feet high built up around the car. Maybe I wanted to get caught, but we never did. We were alone in the world. Jack knew I didn’t like to speak; true enough, but it was my own words I mistrusted. No one else’s. He could say whatever he liked. He could even blurt out that he loved me, as long as he didn’t mean it. That was the important thing. The girl en­cased in ice facing the mountain. The cold silence that was so clean it didn’t hurt. For me, there was nothing beyond those mountains. Nothing worth going toward.

Jack always let me walk home alone and he never tried to follow me. I thought he knew me better than most. I thought he understood I didn’t deserve kindness, or loyalty, or luck. Then one night Jack brought me flowers, a handful of fading daisies he’d picked up at a farm stand, but flowers all the same. That was the end; that was how he ruined everything. The minute Jack acted as though we were any­thing more than two strangers who had a shared interest in death and sex, it was over. As soon as there was the possibil­ity he might actually care for me, I stopped seeing him.