He turns around and smiles.

"I can't believe you just did that."

"Breathe, Lily."

"Oh my God."

He keeps smiling, soul-splitting heart-shattering smiles. I breathe. And then he jumps off the roof with a front tuck somersault thing and lands on his feet.

I walk over to him, right next to him, and bash him in the arm. "You could have killed yourself."

He shakes his head. "I've practiced this a lot. I've practiced it forever."

"You scared me." My hands cross in front of my chest. He takes a step closer.

"No I didn't."

"Yes, you did."

"You weren't scared. You're jealous."

My eyes meet his eyes. His eyes intensify. I swallow. "Can you teach me?"

"You can't do that kind of thing right away."

"I know."

He bumps me with his shoulder. "Of course, I'll teach you. Let's go."

We spend the next forty-five minutes walking on the bleachers. Then I walk on one of the old railroad rails behind the school. Then I do it with my eyes closed. Then I graduate to walking on the bike rack outside of school.

"I can so not do this," I say, eyeing the thin metal that's rounded and so slippery.

"Jump up and I'll hold your hands."

"What if I miss?"

"I'll catch you."

I jump. My body rocks and almost falls but I make it. My feet balance on the edges of it. Paolo grabs my hand. "That was actually the hard part. The jumping. Now walk."

My fingers hang onto his fingers. I look over at his face, dimple-less now, his lips that are open just a little bit like he's ready to kiss someone or say something. No, kiss someone.

"It's fun being tall," I say.

His fingers tighten. "I can't believe you got right up there. It's amazing."

I walk forward and jump off. Then I do it again and again and again until his brother drives up and honks the horn.

I smile up at Paolo again as he grabs his bag. "You have to promise me, no videos where you like fall and crack open your skull or anything."

"I'm not into that. I'm serious about this."

"I can tell."

"That video stuff is not what I'm about."

"What are you about?"

He doesn't answer. Not with words. Instead he just opens his arms wide. Then he winks and runs over to his brother's car, opens the door and rides off, not into the sunset because it's still light out, but somewhere. The good thing, Mr. Wayne? The good thing is I think he'll be back.

After Olivia drops me off, Mike O'Donnell and I walk side by side down the trail that cuts through the woods. We stroll ten feet into the trees, twenty, thirty, fifty, a hundred. Beautiful leaves crunch beneath our feet. Some leaves still hang onto the trees but you can see through those leaves, see the patches of blue. Blue, the color of my eyes, my father's and Mike's. The fall winds swoop across the great lakes over Canada, across the Appalachian Mountains and to us, making it cold.

How I get myself into these situations, I do not know. I glance at him with my peripheral vision. I can't believe this. This is the perfect place to kill me. Hide the body in the swamp. Yep, brilliant move Lily, walking out here with him. The tiny hairs on my arms bristle.

If my life were a horror movie, people would throw popcorn at me, yelling, "You deserve to die, idiot! Walking in the woods! Remember those headlines."

If my life were one of your westerns, he'd make a pass at me and you'd swoop in, jump off the granite boulder over there and pull out your gun or your fist and say, "Let's get a couple things straight, fella."

If my life were my life, which unfortunately it is, no one would come to help at all and I would be some stupid, numb, short girl caught without a plan.

So, here's my plan. If he tries anything I run. If he tries anything I trip him. He's probably already so plastered he'll fall. I trip him. Run. Parkour it and scramble up a tree. When it's safe I'll hike out to the highway, stick out my thumb and hitch a ride to my dad's. That's it. That's my plan.

Trip. Run. Scramble. Hike. Stick. Hitch.

Trip. Run. Scramble. Hike. Stick. Hitch.

My stomach hurts. I wrap my arms around it. His weight shifts closer to me. I shift away.

Trip. Run. Scramble. Hike. Stick. Hitch.

He hums a little bit and then says, "There are things you need to know."

I keep walking, looking at the ground. The thing with Mike is that you never have to say much, he just keeps talking. It's all very low impact. You nod or make a small "mmm" noise and he will go on. I hope he will hurry up with this, because I really want to just run into my bedroom, slam the door and hide. Or maybe go ride my bike, really hard, really far.

"Your mother should probably be the one to tell you this. Actually, we should tell you together. That's what we planned to do, but I think that the time to do this is now, right now. I think you're ready to know."

Know? Know what? There's something like a fur ball stuck in my throat; my stomach knots up. Please, do not let him tell me he killed that guy. Do not let him tell me he's proposed to my mother. Do not let him tell me anything.

"Well, maybe Mom should tell me then," I say, but my voice comes out like a whisper. I hate my voice. I make it bigger. "Okay? Why don't we let Mom tell me?"

He stops walking. I stop walking and ready myself.

Trip. Run. Scramble. Hike. Stick. Hitch.

Above me the pine needles and limbs block most of the sky. His eyes and the sky really are the same color, and both of them look a little cold. I know that he's trying to tell me something he thinks is important, trying to muster up some pseudo male-role-model affection or something, some seriousness that he feels is required because I cried like an idiot the other day, cried like an idiot and he saw. Lord. That's what happened with my mother and Uncle Mark. She cried. He took advantage. Why do I not learn? Aren't you supposed to learn from your mother's mistakes?

Just thinking about Uncle Mark makes me woozy. I sway. I sway and Mike O'Donnell reaches out and grabs my arm. His hand. It is right there. On. My. Arm.

He smells like booze. He's got that swagger too, that insecurity behind his eyes.

"We can wait for Mom." I start forward again. His hand topples off my arm. I head towards the swamp. Decaying leaves make it smell of muck. I caught a turtle once there and kept it in a box for two days before I realized how cruel that was, tethering the turtle to me just because I thought it was neat, instead of letting it go free.

"No, I want to do this now," he says and takes just one stride to catch up with me. He clears his throat, a rumble of phlegm. "Now, I know that you know that your mother and I were friends before. Before I moved away. Before you were born."

I nod. The turtle moved so slowly out of the cardboard box when I decided to let him free. Somehow, I thought he would run for freedom, for the swamp. Instead he barely moved. Like me. I know a person's supposed to buck up and face it when they're afraid, like what you said in that Barbara Walters interview: "When the road looks rough ahead, remember the Man Upstairs and the word Hope. Hang onto both and tough it out."

My stepdad's face comes to me for a second. The smell of Old Spice cologne. He said he was proud of me when I let that turtle go. That's the kind of thing that makes fathers proud, isn't it, Mr. Wayne?

I grab a branch of a tree, break it off, hold it in my hand and pretend it's Hope. Mike doesn't even notice.

I am going to hold onto Hope and tough it out. So I nod at this Mike O'Donnell, this man who shares my mother's bed, this man with a past that leaks out with his breath.

"Now, what you don't know is that ... Well, people make mistakes in their lives. Not mistakes, but bad decisions. Sometimes they're just carried away by things, like when you're driving along, coming home from work and you see a sunset and it's purple and all you can see is that purple, and it's so amazing, so out-and-out beautiful, that you forget you're driving a car and at the last minute you remember, right before you go off the embankment and hit someone's mailbox, you remember and then you swerve back onto the road."

The palms of my hand start to tingle. We are almost at the swamp.

"Now, looking at that sunset wasn't a mistake, really, or even a bad decision. It was just an intense moment, something so beautiful and passionate you got swept away with it. That's what I'm talking about. Am I making sense?"

"Yep," I say, and I start shuffling my feet through the leaves and my sneakers become wet from the water hidden on the undersides, water caught between the leaves and the ground from when it rained on the weekend.

"Now, these moments can be about sunsets or anger or men and women," he says.

I nod again and my belly is fire. My tingling palms are fire. The only thing that's cold and calm are my wet feet, uncomfortable, yeah, but ready to run.

"What I'm trying to say, Lily, is that when your mother was married to your father and when I was married to Jane, your mother and I had an affair."

He pauses. The entire world stops with him. Whoosh. The birds are gone. The trees are gone. I am gone.

The thing is, even if you guess something deep down, even if you almost know ... the saying of it, the saying of it just annihilates you, stops you and you flap off into whiteness like an old-time film that's been spliced in two. You are nothing. Just gone.

"Lily?"

His voice smacks into my chest and my heart starts bumping along inside it. The world begins again. I begin again.

I ignore him and drop a stick called Hope.

I walk right to the edge of the swamp and grab a new stick, a long stick that's fallen off one of the pine trees, chewed off by something, it looks like. The end is pointed and there are tiny bites on the bark. The twigs with pine needles are easy to break off, and when this is done I take the branch and poke it into the swamp, stirring up the mud, looking for turtles or even snakes, just something alive to remind me how to breathe.

I hit at the swamp, smacking up the muck, and each time there's a mucky splash my mind whimpers with it, with what I've always known, My mother is a whore.

I remember my uncle on the boat. I remember how she didn't believe me. I remember the cross. A turtle head peeks out from the far edge of the swamp, watching. Whack. Splash.

My mother is a whore. My mother is ...

Mike O'Donnell puts his hand on my shoulder, pushing on me.

"Lily, you are the product of our affair."

I drop the stick into the mud. The turtle dives below the surface. This man's hand is heavy. He was right. My mother should have been here to tell me this; she should have been the one.

Keep moving. Keep moving.

He won't stop talking, just comes right after me. "You are our love child, our child of love."

Child of love. I am nothing. I am a child of love. A product. I am a big gaping hole. I am a mucky swamp that turtles hide in. My stomach returns, a burning pit.

I hop onto a stump. My balance fails. I fall. Mike O'Donnell's hands try to catch me. He fails. The mud squishes all around me. I stand up quickly. Leaches live in here with the turtles. Leaches suck your blood. They suck and suck at you until there is nothing left.

He reaches out a hand for me to grab, laughs. "You're wet through."

I don't take his hand to get out of the muck. But he's a sucker, this man. He grabs me by the shoulders and hauls me up and I scream, "Don't touch me!"

He drops his hands like I'm fire.

When I am up on the bank again, I check for leaches, try to calm down. This is not how heroes act. This is how victims react. Big breaths. Isn't that supposed to calm you down? I try it and then I say in a voice much calmer than I feel, "I've got to go change."

He nods. "Your mother wants to keep this quiet."

"What quiet?" I spit out the words like they are swamp mud. I spit out the words like they're evil things. They are. Words are. "Keep what quiet?"

"That I'm your father."

It seems to me she's been keeping this quiet for a decade and a half, but I don't say that. Instead I just say, "Uh-huh."

"And ..." He looks into my eyes and I can't look away. It's like there are magnets there, or that he's Superman or a magician, someone with those kind of hypnotic eyes. "I don't know if you should tell your mother about this."

It's Uncle Mark again. It's the line. The line the bad guys feed you to keep you quiet, keep you theirs: Don't tell your mother.

My voice is slow and quiet and shaking. "You don't know if I should tell my mother."

"She wanted to tell you this herself. We don't want your pa in the dog house already, do we?"

"My pa?"

"You don't have to call me that. Keep calling me Mike, if you want."

He looks over at a blow-down on the right, and this time I grab his eyes when he looks back at me and I force him to keep staring. My voice is cold like a monster, like my skin wet from the swamp. "It doesn't seem logical for me to call you Pa if it's supposed to be a big secret, does it?"

"True."

"Then I guess I'll just have to keep calling you Mike."

And then I turn and start running back to the house, tripping over roots and rocks but managing not to fall again.

How could she lie all these years, Mr. Wayne?

How could she make me think my dad didn't love me because he forgot to pay child support? That he was too stupid to remember to feed me? How could she make me love him? All those times, she said over and over again, "He's your father, Liliana. You have to go." "He's your father, Liliana. Be patient with him." All those lies!