I had never seen one up close. We lived in the city, so I'd never even heard one until that night. It was the saddest sound I'd ever heard, just lonely and deep and dark; it must have come from the park across the way, maybe it had gotten lost while hunting and was trying to find its friends. My grandmother ran into the room in her nightclothes and told us to cover our ears.

"What is it?" I asked, scared, hands already clapped tight on either side of my head.

"It's an owl, the most feared of all creatures," she said. Her voice sounded muffled beneath my hands, but I could hear how scared she was.

"Why?"

"Owls bring death. They are the keepers of the dead. To hear or see one is a horrible omen."

My grandmother was an old Apache woman, and from the time I was four to the time I was nine years old, she lived with us in our tiny two bedroom house. Those were the best years I can remember. We had enough food, we had someone to play with, we had someone who cared for us and told us stories and made us birthday presents, beautiful beaded purses and little dolls right out of the stories we heard, about how the fox stole fire and how the world was made from the sweat of the gods, a tiny brown ball that grew and grew, like a heart.

Sometimes there are no omens; sometimes life just happens, the way the fox stole fire, sudden and unexpected, too fast to make out the details. I didn't see or hear an owl before she died, and maybe that's why I was so surprised. Me and my sister, Kat, found her sitting in her chair in the living room, eyes wide open and glazed, quiet as glass.

But that night I heard one calling in the trees outside my bedroom window. I was so scared I couldn't move; I just pulled the covers over my head with my eyes wide open, goosebumps prickling all over me. Kat didn't even wake up. The next evening I actually saw one, a big brown blur, flying from one tree to another. If hearing one was bad, seeing one had to be even worse.

"I saw it, and it saw me," I whispered to Kat that night, sitting cross legged on the bed, fighting back terrified tears. "Do you think it was Grandma's ghost? That's twice now. Do you think she's haunting me?"

"Oh please. You don't really believe in those stupid stories do you?" she asked.

That wasn't the right question; the right question was how could I not? Those stories were as much a part of me as the color of my eyes. My mother agreed with Kat, though, and told me they were just legends; she'd go so far as slapping my face when I mentioned them, if she was in a bad enough mood. My mother was a devout Catholic and had spent her childhood having those legends ripped out of her by the sisters at the boarding school. I couldn't expect her to get it, or Kat. All I knew was that I had seen an owl, and it had seen me. . . and that couldn't be good.

Turns out, I was right.

My name is Avery Marie Grace. My mom used to tell me she got that name from Ave Maria, but I've never been too clear about what that means. I'm seventeen years old, and for almost a whole year, I mostly made my home in the backseat of my sister's car.

The night we left I thought we were heading somewhere; at the very least, I thought we had someone waiting for us on the other side of the state line. But we just kept driving, driving, and driving. I knew we were going nowhere, but I convinced myself there was a destination. When the car broke down in Kansas, we pushed it to a garage, got it fixed, and kept driving. When it started to ice and sleet was slick on the roads, we kept driving. When winter ended and spring came and weeds pushed themselves through the cracks in the sidewalks beside our car, we kept driving.

Back then my definition of home was the house I always drew in kindergarten: a perfect square block with a triangle roof, two windows, and a chimney with a strand of smoke curling out of it. Once we hit the road, I scrapped that definition and decided that home meant being with people who know you. Eventually I'd have to scrap that one too, but in the car with my sister, it seemed more right than anything else I'd thought of.

Kat had always been beautiful. Like me, she was half Native American and had inherited Mom's piercing black eyes and long black hair; she was dark, tall, and wild. People tell me I am pretty too, but I'm not beautiful, and from an early age, I've known the difference. I got my blue eyes from somewhere (since I've never even seen a picture of my father I just assume they came from him). I'm too pale to be Native but too Native to be white. I'm short and small and easy to overlook. My hair is black too, but I always cut it off at the shoulders and am thinking about dyeing it blue for the winter.

My mom was almost never at home, and when she was she was usually asleep on the living room sofa with socks on her feet and one hand on the remote control, an infomercial chatting away on the tv, so I learned to look to Kat to run my bath water and make my lunch. Back then she was my mom, my dad, and my best friend all at once. We talked about everything. We shared a bedroom, and at night I'd always come over to her bed and whisper until we fell asleep.

Kat's dream was to ride horses. Living in the city, we had never even seen a horse up close, let alone ridden one, but she cut out magazine pictures of them and read books like, The Mystery at Dakota Ranch all the time. Sometimes she'd read them to me, but she would always go slow on the descriptions of horses, the way a river flows at a different pace from one spot to another. I should have known then that she was planning to leave, just from the look in her eyes, but I never caught on.

Eventually the old Kat disappeared and the new one took her place. The new Kat was too old for horse mysteries and put away all her books; she stopped cutting out horse pictures too.

She started sneaking out at night through the window above her bed, and from where I was it looked like she was crawling right out into the night sky. I would watch her with one eye open, hear the voices of her friends and boyfriends down in the yard, laughing and whispering. Her appearance changed too. She started wearing more makeup, and her eyes seemed dull, angry. She smelled like smoke when she came home; she rolled her eyes when she looked at me. If I had seen her in a crowd from far away, I couldn't have known that it was Kat.

"Hey," I whispered, standing over her bed in my PJ's one night. I could feel the scratchy floor under my feet, and something cold, a penny, which I ground down into the carpet.

"What?" she mumbled, her face in the pillow.

"What about the name Starlight? For our horse?" I asked. We were always talking about that- "our horse". By then both of us had a pretty good idea that it would never happen, but it was the one dream we shared, and because of that it meant more to me than anything in the world.

"It's lame," she mumbled, so final, so sure, the way she'd told me my fears about the owl were stupid.

I waited for her to say more. She was lying there, arms shoved under her pillow, her head a ratty black tangle of hair.

"What do you like then?"

"We're not getting a horse!" she snapped, and she raised her head and glared at me. In that instant it was like she became someone else, someone I had never even spoken to before. I went back to bed and cried, knowing that I had lost something much bigger than I could comprehend, and that sooner or later I would feel the absence of it in every area of my life.

That's why I was surprised when she asked me to go with her that night. She shook me awake and told me to put on my shoes and socks and take whatever I wanted. I took a few clothes and some underwear, and the horse pictures I'd gathered into a shoe box. We didn't tell Mom we were leaving, and for some reason I don't remember thinking anything was weird about that. I was sure we would be back.

We picked up Kat's boyfriend, Josh, in Missouri, where he was staying with his father for the summer, and they made the front seat their own. I wasn't allowed to sit up there or sleep up there, and they'd kill me if I touched the radio. Josh was a druggie, but he knew I liked chocolate donuts and got me some on that first day. He made me laugh, and he loved my sister. I didn't care that he was a druggie.

"You know I'm going to ask your sister to marry me right?" he asked me one day in the car after Kat had gone into a gas station to buy lunch.

I looked up from the book I was reading and raised one eyebrow. "Okay."

I saw Josh's reflection shrug in the rear view mirror. He didn't look anything like Kat, I remember thinking. He was blond and as pale as me, his eyes the color of snow clouds. He turned and held up a plain diamond ring. It wasn't Kat at all.

"I love her."

"Okay."

"Like. . . really, Avery."

"Uh huh," I said, focusing on my book, but no longer reading the words, the sentences like snakes slowly beginning to crawl up and wrap around my wrists.

"You got a problem with that?" he asked, his voice hard.

My muscles were tense. I was glad when Kat came back, shaking snow out of her black hair.

I ignored what was happening. I didn't want to accept that Kat was shooting up too, right behind me in the motel rooms. I'd watch tv, not really seeing the image, looking beyond it into the black and white reflection of her sitting on the bed, tapping the needle, Josh strung out on the mattress beside her with the band still tied around his skinny arm. I ignored it; I wished it away. Kat would never do that.

Somewhere along the way, Josh must have pawned the ring for drug money. I never saw Kat wear it, and as far as I know he never gave it to her. I wasn't sure she loved him; when I watched her with him, they seemed more like survival-buddies than lovers, sharing a sleeping bag for warmth.

We slept in the car, even in winter. Sometimes we got a motel room, but not often. On long drives, especially at night, I'd peal back the curtain I'd hung in the backseat and watch the world blurring past, long streams of headlights fading off behind us like comet's tails. The sky seemed as near as a kiss.

Winter nights were long and black. I'd huddle up in the backseat in my coat like an owl hiding in a tree. Kat's eyes were hard. Josh was restless, wanting a fix; I'd try to make him laugh; he'd snap at me. I'd watch them fall asleep, cuddling close to each other for warmth, whispering so quietly I could never hear what they said, just like the way me and Kat used to whisper about horses. There was no one to keep me warm. I would look out my window at the sky, because on some nights, I just couldn't look around at where we were: a Wal-Mart parking lot, a grassy field with a rusty broken fence, the cracked stretch of road underneath a cement overpass. "This is the world. This is all there is," I remember thinking. So I would look up instead, wanting to see the one beautiful thing that never seemed to change, no matter how far we drove.

One morning we woke up in the parking lot of a liquor store, and Josh wasn't there. It was too early for the sun to be up, but there was light enough to see. Gray light. I remember it being early November, but in that part of the country it was already winter and snowing hard.

Kat got out of the car. I peeled back my makeshift curtain over the window and watched her. She leaned against the door, staring intently down the street, restlessly kicking at an empty beer bottle. The glass chinked on the pavement and rolled in a circle, the tip facing inward. I watched her walk to a payphone, hands shoved into her coat pockets, long black hair flying loose in the wind. Even with her coat on, she looked so skinny, so alone.

I saw Kat hang up and redial several times, turning her back to me. The glass on the door of the phonebooth glinted in the weak sunlight, obscuring my vision of her.

"Where is Josh?" I asked when she came back.

She shrugged, and I knew she was telling the truth when she said, "I don't know."

Kat never talked about her feelings, but I knew she must have felt something for Josh, because we waited there all day long. We never saw him again.

Kat and I kept driving for a few more weeks, but it wasn't the same without Josh. I didn't move up into the front seat, and she never asked me to. We stopped driving somewhere in Colorado. It was cold there. The car chugged up to a house with a saggy front porch and a yellow pickup in the driveway. Kat stopped, turned off the engine, and got out. I followed her.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"Nowhere," she said.

"Are we ever gonna call Mom?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Stop asking questions."

We spent the next couple of months crashing at random people's houses, where there were always three or four other people sleeping on the floors or the couch. I hated it. And something was happening to Kat. She was skinny, her eyes were dark, her hair was thin, her hands were shaky. She was only nineteen, but she looked at least thirty, maybe even forty. She looked like our mom.

Without Josh, there was no one to keep us safe. There were always men at the houses, flirting with her, putting their arms around her, trying to put their hands up her shirt. At first she would blow them off, say no, fight if she had to. Then she started giving in. I knew that's where the money came from; I wasn't stupid. She never told me, but I knew. It was how we bought our food and gas, new socks and underwear, toothpaste and shampoo, and by then I'd figured out that it was how we'd survived so long on the road, too. It was how Kat fought off the monsters in her head with each new prick of the needle.

We lived in so many places it was hard for me to keep going to school. Kat always made me. "Read books. That's how people know stuff," she'd say. So I read books. At least, I tried, but nothing made sense anymore; nothing mattered; I just recited my grandmother's stories over and over in my head, because that was the last thing I had to hold onto. Maybe they were stupid, maybe they made no sense, but usually it's the meaningless things that you miss the most, and the stupid things that are the last to go.

We moved every few weeks, and by the end of my sophomore year we were living at this guy named Seth's house. He lived with his girlfriend, who hated me because she thought I had a thing for him, when the truth was I couldn't stand either of them.

It was April, almost the end of the school year. I came home from school and was met at the door by Seth. "Your sister's gone," he said.

"What do you mean she's gone?" I asked, shivering in the cool spring wind.

"Gone," he shrugged.

His dark eyes were sharp, like the jagged edge of a table.

"Gone where?"

"Who knows. Just gone."

Seth's girlfriend, Amy, appeared next to him in the doorway, holding out my blue backpack. "We packed your stuff."

"Where is Kat?" I asked. This was some joke; it had to be. "Didn't she say anything?"

"Nope," Seth said.

"Well maybe she just went out for awhile."

"Took all her stuff and the car," Amy said, "She ain't coming back."

"But what about me?"

I heard how pathetic I sounded, how small and helpless. There was no where to make my home except inside my clothes, and I felt myself shrink into my heavy coat, tears brimming in my eyes, chin trembling. Why would Kat just leave? She was all I had, and she knew it.

"Look," Seth sighed, "Don't you know anybody else?"

I blinked, over and over and over, trying to wake up. No. I knew no one. Kat and I were always moving, always driving, always running.

"Then call the police. They'll help you out," Amy said, and then she shut the door, dropping my backpack at my feet.

I turned around and just blinked in that frosty wind, the trees tinged with green. There was the owl. I don't know what drew my eyes to him, sitting high in the branches of a pine tree off to my left. His strange, pointed face was turned toward me. I looked back, dead on; what did I have to lose? I looked at him until he flew away, because I had nothing else to do. I was sixteen then.

Now I'm seventeen, and I'm in the car again, this time not with Kat, driving up to a little town called Ashbury. I watch the country changing out my window. The flat land ripples into hills and then mountains, like the curve of a neck just below the chin. There are woods, rows of tall pine trees with their sticky bark. A couple miles back, a deer crossed the road, scrambling back and forth in front of the car, its eyes white with fear. I will be staying with a foster family. The Whites. Sara and Peter White.

"You'll like it in Ashbury. It's a small town, small school. You'll make a lot of friends there," Mrs. Norton, my caseworker, says.

She smiles at me. I try to smile back. In my arms I clutch my backpack, the only possession I have. It is full of clothes and the horse pictures, most of them ripped and ruined by now. The car drives up the mountain in a circle, like a wind-up toy, and I imagine that if we stop it will move back down all on its own.

They couldn't find my mom, and I haven't seen or heard from Kat in almost five months now. Since she left, since I saw that owl, I have changed my definition of home again. Home is now me. Wherever I am, wherever I can survive, wherever I can have a thought that no one else knows about. That's home. I am the only thing left in the whole world that I know I will never lose.

A/N: I was going to wait until the end of the summer to start revising this story (formerly titled Dwelling Place), but due to some circumstances that are happening in my life right now, I feel very compelled to write this story now. Ghosts Underwater will still be updated, so don't worry. I just need to focus on this right now. . .