Chapter 6: A Walk Through the Salt-Bitten Forest

The invitation arrived on Tuesday, written in the margin of her copy of the literature anthology.

Not her copy, precisely. The school's copy, stamped on the inside cover with a faded library mark and the year 1987, the pages soft with decades of reluctant handling. She had left it on the desk in Room 14 at the end of third period and collected it again after lunch, and somewhere in the interval two words had appeared in the margin beside the third stanza of the Keats poem they were meant to be annotating.

*Saturday. Dawn.*