you're learning, child. It's not entirely hopeless.” Elizabet smiled. “It only looks that way. Now, think of something, really concentrate on it.”
Kayla tried to think of something to concentrate on. It was a beautiful day outside, really great, not too smoggy, a perfect day to go to a park. . . .
That would be nice, she thought, smiling. To go to the park next to the house. . . .
She thought about the park down the street from her house, the house where she'd lived with her parents before . . . before the Awful Day. She loved that park. Mom and Dad used to walk with her there in the evening, as the sun was setting through the tall trees. It was different from all the other parks she'd ever seen: a wild, untamed place where the gardeners and keepers seemed more interested in the little community gardening project at the back of the park rather than the park itself. The trees were left alone to grow into unruly shapes tangled with ivy and surrounded by shrubs. The paths through the park were hard to find and harder to follow, but that was something she loved. There was one tree that she loved best, a huge old oak tree with broad spreading branches which filled the sky. Dad said that the tree was at least two hundred years old. Sometimes Kayla had thought she could hear laughter from the tree, the flickering movement of someone climbing in the branches, but Dad always said that it was only the wind, there wasn't anyone there.
She'd run to that tree on the Awful Day, the day she'd come home from school and found the police cars in front of her house. Old Mrs. Liddy had called the cops after hearing gunshots from next door and seeing some cars leave fast. They wouldn't let her into the house, into her own house; she heard some of the cops talking about how they'd found blood, but no bodies.
She remembered running to the park, falling onto the thick moss under the tree and crying. That's where the cops had found her, hours later. She could