In our town, little boys stood with their hands jammed into their back pockets, fighting to keep their fingers from curling into their father’s fists. Little girls swayed with sunken eyes that wished more than anything to be sucked back into their skulls, into the safety of darkness. But Kit and I had found our haven, and for us, it was the wind.

We learned not to cry. No crying. No crying. No crying.

We kept busy, Kit and I. We were very good at being busy. When school ended and we were forced to leave, we had one mission: don’t go home.

Things were never good at home. In our town, it was colder inside than it could ever be outside. So we used our time together to escape.

The day we met, I had been sitting at my lunch table alone when the wind spoke. It had a voice—not the kind of voice that communicates in words, but rather in gestures. When I felt its coldness wrap around me that day, and it was Kit’s soft eyes that I met across the table, I knew that we were in this together. The wind had spoken to us both. Somehow we knew to listen to it.

Three months later, after a cold winter’s day at school, Kit and I began the routine walk to our neighborhood, which was a few blocks down, over by Old Burto’s Park. Our streets were filled with what mama had called “one-story wonders,” though I never saw what was so wonderful. Our house had these scratches across the front along with missing tiles that made it look like a cat had clawed it. Mama said those imperfections gave the house character—like our chipped coffee mugs from the dollar store off the I-55.

Kit had one of those paper fortune tellers in his hand, the kind that you fold into fourths and unfold to read the small words written in each square.

“Did you make that?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Cool.”

After a moment, he looked at me. The thing people didn’t understand about Kit was that he just didn’t enjoy talking to most people. He enjoyed his own company. Maybe that’s why I liked him.

“Do you want me to tell you your fortune?” he asked.

I nodded. Neither one of us ever had any idea where we were going, but the wind kept our feet moving until a place felt right.

         Several more streets had gone by, and Kit still hadn’t told me my fortune. I kept peeking at him over my shoulder and caught him redoing the process when he didn’t agree with the answer.

“You’re cheating,” I scolded.

“I’m not.”

“I saw you redo it.”

“Because it was wrong, that’s why.”

“What did it say?”

“Never mind,” he said bitterly.

“Liarliarliarliar,” I sang. The word brought back images of Mama with her glassy eyes, gaze fixed across the yard toward Johnny’s dust-coated window. He liked to come over to the house on weekends and talk with my mother in her bedroom, door closed. Sometimes, she screamed.

When I asked about the screaming, she’d smile emptily. When I asked what happened, she’d tell me they’d found a treasure map hidden in a cork bottle; all they needed was a way to mine the gold. And no, honey, she wasn’t screaming, she was laughing! Johnny liked to tickle her because grown ups tickle each other sometimes. She’d tell me they learned how to reach the stars, told me they had a plan to buy a house in the countryside where the wind wouldn’t whisper profanities at night and steal us from our slumber.

I’d pretended to like Johnny, eager to escape our house that with each day grew more noisy and irritated. I stopped asking what they’d discussed in the room. He always entered with a moth-colored square bottle in the crook of his armpit, hips rocking with each uneven footfall. He would ignore me, of course, eyes trained on the door that led to my mother’s bedroom where she held her knees to her chest like a marble, constantly in motion, swaying with the rhythm of the birch trees, her own elixir in hand.

Once, in the dark, I startled him. Within a moment, he had his hands full of my shirt. I could smell the stale scent of his breath that seeped through the gap in his yellow front teeth. Huh, I thought, character. I think I was screaming. Mama screamed to keep me company. Or maybe we were laughing. I wasn’t sure there was a difference.

Unlike me, Kit had stopped being ruffled a long time ago.

“I’ll only tell you what I actually believe,” he said softly.

After two more steps, we stopped. Kit unfolded the corner of his fortune teller and opened to a new prediction. In response, the corners of his lips lifted and he turned it to face me. “‘Soon you will be free,’” he read aloud.

“That’s it?”

“It’s a good fortune.”

We continued to the park, falling into an eerie silence. We didn’t dare say it, but the two of us could feel that things were different. Mama didn’t laugh anymore. The sun had been gone for twelve days. Kit’s dad…well, he rarely left the house. It seemed that the wind had completely abandoned us. We no longer felt the comforting murmurs that urged us to stay outside, to test time just a little by embracing the earth for as long as it’d have us. Without the wind’s guidance, we were becoming restless. Hopeless.

Kit and I stayed on the grass anyway, freezing time while we could, hoping the wind would come back to shield us from what waited for us at home. I had to be quiet so Johnny could chat with Mama, and Kit—he had his father to worry about. Kit once told me that he never saw the monsters his father yelled at in the dark. But Kit’s father was older and wiser, so Kit was sure they must be there.

Finally, we got to a spot in Old Burto’s Park. We were stopped in the middle of the field, maybe ten feet between us. Even without the wind, we sensed it: this was our spot for today. Kit threw his fortune teller into the space between us.

“What game should we play today? Staring contest?”

“No.”

Kit’s face was angled toward the dirt, and with the clouds as dark as they were, and the trees as sad as they got in winter, he looked haunted. “Kit?”

“Stella,” he said quietly, “I don’t want to go home.”

I was confused. “Me neither. That’s why we’re playing a game.”

“No, I mean…I don’t want to go home ever.”

I just stood there for a moment, frozen. I wanted him to take it back. I wanted us to go through our ritual of stopping time. We were good at stopping time, but we had never tried to kill it.

“What?” My voice quavered on the way out, and suddenly, I felt cold. “What do you mean?”

His lips trembled and he said, “Yesterday, Dad saw men chasing him again and started running around the house. I tried to follow him, but the men weren’t stopping. Then he…he found me and told me it was me all along. I was the demon he couldn’t escape from.”

Kit had never talked that much before.

“I don’t want to go home,” he repeated. “Let’s stay here forever.”

“How long is forever?” I was scared to know, but also, I was relieved. I didn’t want to see Johnny; he was a liar who bragged about gold and had none.

“I don’t know.”

“What about the wind?”

“What about it?” he snapped. “It hasn’t been here in weeks. It’s given up on us.”

I nodded. I wasn’t scared anymore, I swear I wasn’t. “What should we do?”

“Let’s play Pancake!” Pancake was a hand game we created last year and soon learned to master.

“Yeah!”

I could already feel the adrenaline. We ran to each other, stopping on either side of the fortune teller, which still sat between our feet.

Soon you will be free.

Kit stood before me, eyes darting between mine in anticipation. “Ready?”

The wind whistled through the trees and into our park, zipping into the play structure and causing the swings to hiss in warning. I felt a thrill go through me. The wind was here, the wind was watching, but it didn’t speak.

“Ready.”

He raised his hands and we began. Time was a rusty CD scraping by on my mother’s player, and we were the ghosts, spinning it faster and faster until the elegant melody transformed into a high-pitched squeal.

We shoved our hands together, stomped our feet, spun, shouted, and repeated—over and over again, even as the sky darkened ominously and the wind grew louder, this time brushing my hair in front of my face.

To speed time up, we sped up our game, words cut short and hands moving in bursts. We watched each other. We counted. We rolled our heads back and tried again.

We can do this, I thought. We can do this forever.

The faster we went, the angrier the sky became. The sun, hidden behind a wall of fog, burnt the gray clouds into charcoal as the wind—truly alive for the first time in weeks—scraped leaves off the floor to hurl in our direction. But we were tireless. I thought of Kit’s dad chasing him around the house, I thought of Johnny tickling Mama, and I thought of the treasure that was sure to lay on the other side of forever, waiting for us.

It was getting hard to see. We were far away from the dim streetlamps scattered across the old boulevard, and the trees formed a stoic army, blocking the light from the stars. It was almost night. Any minute now, the doors on our little street would open and our parents would stick their heads out into the cool air, voices luring us back into our homes.

The cold was starting to eat at me, creeping under my coat through the ends of my sleeves.

Kit and I were still going through Pancake, his icy hands bumping mine. With each high five, my arms kept wanting to fall slack.

“Kit,” I mumbled, my lips stiff, “Kit, I’m cold.”

If time was once a disk, spinning quickly around its axis, it was now completely flying off its hinges.

Before Kit could answer, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, my front door open just across the street. A second later, just like always, Kit’s door opened, and out came his father muttering to the bad men.

“Keep playing,” Kit responded. He didn’t sound like a kid at all anymore. He sounded grown. “Keep playing.”

Somewhere in the distance, I could hear Johnny yelling at me, yelling my name only for the wind to carry it away. The wind was wild now, completely uncontrollable. In our rebellion, we broke our unspoken pact to listen. In retribution, it sent the trees lurching to the side. It nearly uprooted Kit and me from our spots. Kit’s voice snapped me to attention: “Ignore it.”

The longer we ignored it, the harsher the wind became. The sky was completely black now. With the rush of cold air constantly hitting my eyes, I could hardly even see. But I could hear. There was a distant crackling overhead, and it began to rain.

It wasn’t long before we were soaked, our hands slipping into each others’, eyes fighting to stay open, and the wind, the wind; I could feel it wrapping its arms around my waist, tugging me to my house, pleading with me to trust, to obey. I tried to shove it away, tried to scare off the funny voice it had, but my lips were chapped and I wanted Mama.

“It’s not working!” I cried desperately, the fortune teller rolling into my foot. “We need to try something else!”

Kit sounded like he was crying. “I’m not going home, Stella.”

That gave me an idea. “Then where do you want to be? If you could go anywhere?”

He was quiet, and I knew he could feel the wind hissing, creeping into his ears, commanding him to leave. The first bolt of lightning crashed into the earth several blocks away—one monstrous beam. Kit spoke louder.

“A big, white mansion!” After he shouted it, the wind pulled back in surprise. “With a husky named Disco. An Xbox. A swimming pool!”

I was yelling with him now. “A warm blanket. Stuffed dolls! Tons of them.”

Suddenly, as the wind sharply twisted my vision, I could see it before me, clear as day. Mama and I were walking around our house. It was beige and had big ornate windows. Down the hill was the beach, waves crashing along the shore. Mama was laughing, and her voice was just like a wind chime. The sky was only ever blue and the clouds were only white and our grass was green and there wasn’t a park because we didn’t need one.

Then I could see Kit and his dad; they were smiling like father and son. His dad looked young, his eyes sharp. He and Kit were walking Disco together outside, right by the beach, and Kit was talking like he’d never talked before.

I thought I might die of happiness.

With a groan, the wind rushed inward, stealing from us our perfect picture. Another bolt of lightning. Two blocks away. The wind clawed my back with fresh fury, but I was done listening.

“Warm food every night!”

We were so loud, I swear. We were going to be here forever.

“A dad!” I screamed.

“A mom!” Kit cried.

Thunder again. This time, it came from our street, the sound so deafening, I couldn’t even hear when I said, “Gold, gold, gold!”

The wind slapped the words right out of my mouth, swept them up just as the fourth bolt of lightning hit the fortune teller between us with one infinite boom. Kit and I were thrown backward into the air. I landed on top of the slide, the hard edges jamming into my stomach. It felt like I’d been ripped in two. Kit was only a few feet away, shaking on his side. The wind had stolen us in one last, desperate fit. It wanted us to see the truth.

We saw Mama on her bed. Johnny was there with her, twisting her head to the side with his hand. The other one held something smooth and silver, which he pointed at her warningly. He was yelling that he knew she had his money.

Then the wind whipped our heads to the side and showed us something else. A young man was standing on a balcony, his face paralyzed with fear—Kit’s dad. Before him stood a woman. She was pleading with him to listen to her and not the sickness. He lurched forward wildly. She backed away, and after one more step, fell right off the balcony. Her broken body lay splayed on the sidewalk.

My skin burned. My lungs were ripped apart in my chest. I couldn’t feel where I started and the wind ended. With my eyes closed, I could hear the faint murmur of my heart. The last thing I heard was the crinkling of Kit’s paper fortune teller, shuddering against the breeze.

When I opened my eyes, I could hear the gentle chirp of the birds, piercing through the sleepy haze. I turned my head and found Kit next to me, his hand extended to me in offering. I took it. Up above, the sky was brilliant blue, the clouds soft and fluffy like the most delicious cotton candy.

We were standing in the middle of a grassy field labeled by a crooked sign as “Old Burto’s Park.” Across the street, two polished houses waited for us, tiles shining under a generous and sparkling sun. Through the open window I made out the contours of a new Xbox, which sat on the uncracked leather sofa.

A dog ran by suddenly, a husky with big blue eyes, and I started laughing because everything was beautiful and I liked the sound of my joy. Then Kit was laughing too, and it was wonderful.

Something shifted from inside my pocket, and when I took it out and held it in my palm, I saw that it was a little paper fortune teller.

“What’s our fortune?” Kit asked.

I opened it and read aloud: “‘Soon you will be free.’”

“It’s a good fortune,” he shrugged. “Come here, Disco!”

The husky circled back to lick Kit’s fingers.

I brought my arms out to the side to better feel the wind. Something was familiar about it, the way it skimmed across my skin like a cool-lipped kiss, yet I couldn't quite place why. The fortune teller fell from my hand, traveling back into the park, unraveling and unraveling. I watched it tumble into the grass before blowing away into the distance.

We crossed the street, and I forgot all about the silly fortune.