Sarah Mott, in her early forties, had come to Western Massachusetts after receiving her master’s in library science at Simmons in Boston. Sarah wasn’t a local, and she wasn’t one to judge; she always tried to keep an open mind, but she had a bad feeling about the Community. There had been a little commune in Blackwell in the sixties that people talked about, but that had been about peace and love, a reaction to an unjust and unpopular war. The Community seemed far darker, run by secret rules. Sarah could tell that Mia lived up at the farm because of her braided hair and her clothing, modest gray garments and black work boots. She’d heard that books weren’t allowed inside the farm, and didn’t that say just about everything? In a place where books were banned there could be no personal freedom, no hope, and no dreams for the future. Sarah was glad the red-haired girl visited the library, even if she was stealing books. Turn someone into a reader and you turn the world around. But she was so obvious in her actions and so clueless that Sarah really felt she had no choice but to confront the girl in the best way she knew how, by welcoming her.

  “Did you need some help choosing books?” Sarah Mott asked.

  Once she’d been caught, Mia was panic-stricken; she probably should have run, but instead she was frozen in place. She would rather be sent to jail than have her father called and be publicly punished. “No,” she managed to say. “I don’t need help.”

  “Well, enjoy the ones you’ve chosen, just know that we love to have the books back so other people can read them.” Sarah handed Mia a library card. “This makes you official. Take out as many as you’d like.”

  That was when the door opened, and Mia stepped through. She gratefully took the library card and thanked Mrs. Mott. When she got back to the farm, she went up to the barn. Most of the ewes stayed away, but Mia’s favorite, Dottie, came to sit beside her as she hid the card behind a loose plank of wood, in the place where she would come to conceal her treasures.

  * * *

  “ARE YOU DOING WHAT I think you’re doing?” Ivy said when they encountered one another in the dining room a few weeks later. They happened to be standing next to one another in line; there was no reason for anyone to think that they’d planned to do so. Dinner that evening was macaroni and sweet potatoes and tomato salad. “Are you going there?”

  “Going where?” Mia said as if she hadn’t the faintest idea of what her mother was talking about

  “You know.” Ivy gave Mia a little nudge. “The castle?”

  “You said there are no castles in real life,” Mia said cheerfully.

  Ivy gave her a look. “Be careful.”

  “I will be,” Mia assured her.

  “I mean it,” Ivy said, before breaking away to speak to some of the women who always said she never gave them the time of day. She had to be careful, too, and she knew it.

  From then on, all that Mia knew about the world, she learned from books. She knew what heather looked like and what damage a typhoon at sea might do. She memorized names of streets in Paris and San Francisco and New York. She discovered the Lost Boys and a world in the future in which firemen burned books and people memorized entire novels to make certain they would never die. She read Shakespeare’s plays and came to understand that transformations were always possible. The person she was becoming could not be seen by anyone at the Community and she often thought of her favorite line from Henry IV, Part I. We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible. Her real self was hidden with the books she kept in the sheep barn. Whenever Mia could get away unnoticed, she hiked into the forest to read her most recent novel on the bank of the Last Look River. The birds took flight when she turned the pages, the leaves were shaken from the trees. If there be magic, Mia whispered there in the forest, let it be mine.

  * * *

  IN THE COMMUNITY, STUDENTS stopped attending school after the age of fifteen. There was no graduation and no ceremony, they simply traded one set of chores for another. Joel believed that work was more valuable to young minds and occasionally, Mia worked in the office alongside Ivy, filing and sending out the mail. That was how Evangeline had found them, mother and daughter together at the desk going over the figures from the farm stand.

  “Is she supposed to be here?” Evangeline asked Ivy when she spied Mia. “Wouldn’t it be better for her to be working outside, getting more exercise?”

  Children belong to everyone. Love is everywhere. There is only one family, and it is us.

  “Why don’t you ask Joel?” Ivy was always civil to Evangeline, because she knew the older woman’s opinion mattered. She took the risk of speaking up to her now only because Joel was in the doorway. From the look he’d given her, Ivy knew what he would want from her when they were alone, and so she felt she had some leverage. “Mia is learning some business skills,” Ivy said to her husband.

  “Good for her.” Joel nodded his approval. “Be smart, but not too smart,” he advised Mia. “No one likes a girl who’s too smart for her own good.”

  Mia flinched and lowered her eyes as she always did when she was in her father’s presence. He was said to have the ability to see right through a person. Members of the Community swore that he could tell who was a liar in five minutes flat, and who was a thief in under a minute. That was why Mia was nervous. She happened to be both.

  “Mia is quite enterprising,” Evangeline commented, as if it were a bad thing.

  “She’s dutiful,” Ivy responded. She lifted her eyes to her husband. She knew him better than most. Better than Evangeline. After all, she spent every night in his bed. “As am I,” she said, looking directly at him and no one else.

  When Joel left, Evangeline went into the attached kitchenette to make a cup of tea. Mia was done for the day and about to close the file drawer when she spied something stuffed into the very back, clearly ignored for years. She pulled it out and when she unfolded the paper she discovered a small, delicate watercolor painting of Hightop Mountain. There were the yellow fields and the ferns in the marshlands near Last Look River. It was a rendering of the land before the Community came to settle here. For the first time Mia saw how beautiful Berkshire County was. The little watercolor was a treasure, the first thing she had ever wanted for her own. There was some scrawled writing on the back of the paper, in red ink, likely made of mulberries, faded and pale. Mia could barely read it, and the words meant nothing to her. It was the beautiful little painting that held her attention. Art was not allowed in the Community, and Mia had never been to a museum; she could not recall ever seeing a painting or drawing.

  Evangeline walked in with her steaming cup of English breakfast tea. She always said it was the one thing she couldn’t live without, and she kept the tea leaves in a jar hidden in a cupboard in the little kitchen because Joel always said having to indulge in something every day was an addiction, whether it was heroin or coffee or tea.

  “What’s that?” she asked Mia when she saw the girl fumbling with some paper.

  “Nothing,” Mia said, even though she knew it was the wrong answer.

  “It’s a painting,” Ivy said as Evangeline peered at it. It looked harmless enough to Ivy, and she didn’t care for the way Evangeline bossed her daughter around. “Mia wants to create a mural for the little ones at the school and she’s going to copy this.”

  Mia was grateful that her mother had stepped in. She quickly folded the artwork into her pocket. She didn’t pay attention to the writing on the back, but she’d noticed the signature. Carrie Oldenfield Starr, the name of Joel’s first wife. Carrie wasn’t spoken of much, although every year a bouquet of wildflowers was left at her grave on the day she had died. Ivy had told her that all they had was due to Carrie, and Mia had always wondered why this woman who was their benefactor was never thanked at Sunday meetings. Now she thought perhaps it was because she had been a painter.

  “Art?” Evangeline said. “Would Joel be pleased with that?”

  “His first wife was an artist. I think he would approve,” Ivy assured her. She was his second wife, after all, and should have some say in the matter.

  Evangeline stared for a while before she broke the silence. “Fine. Take it,” she said to Mia. Evangeline wasn’t going to argue the point, and it was true that the school could use some brightening up. “Just make sure you paint landscape. No vain depictions of human forms.”

  The mural wasn’t perfect, and working on it ate up most of Mia’s free time for the next few weeks, so that she had to skip reading, but she actually enjoyed herself. Tim, the building manager, allowed her some leftover paint, cans of blue and yellow and green, and if you were a small child and had never seen a mural before, you might stare at the painted wall in a state of awe when you recognized Hightop Mountain and the fields where the corn grew in neat rows. Even Evangeline had to admit that Mia had done a decent job. The little watercolor by Carrie Oldenfield Starr was forgotten by everyone but Mia, who kept it hidden in the barn along with her library card. She often took it out to look at it, imagining the land where they lived as the painter had presented it, back when there was only a single white farmhouse alongside a small barn, before the Community had been built. Mia wished she was in that place right now, in the field where sunflowers grew, where it might be possible to be who you wished to be and you could read books all day long and no one would say a word about it. A place where no one would punish you for being who you were.

  * * *

  TAKE ONE RISK AND you’ll soon take more. It’s an addiction or it’s bravery, it’s foolishness or it’s desperation. Mia went beyond the confines of the gate at the end of their long dirt driveway more and more often. She wondered what would happen if she were to travel west on Route 17. Would she reach the moon? Would she find city streets where there were bookstores and coffeehouses where she could be invisible and do as she pleased?

  The best time to break the rules was during contemplation hours, Saturdays between four and six, when people were supposed to meditate and look inward, then get down on their knees, wherever they were, and be thankful for all that they had and all the Community had given them. That was usually Mia’s reading time, but after searching for the original book, the one with her name in it, she had become restless, and that was when the wandering began. She went down to the athletic fields and watched a soccer match played by local children, excited for the winning team, even though she didn’t understand the rules. She went into the bakery and stared at the gorgeous three-tiered cakes named after the deadly sins, including Gluttony, Envy, and Wrath. She sat outside the police station on a wooden bench. “Everything okay?” an officer coming out of the building asked her, a puzzled look on his face. People in the Community never approached the police, not for any reason. “You have a good view from here,” Mia said. The building was directly across the green from the library. “I guess we do,” the officer said. Mia took off quickly, not wanting to draw any more attention to herself. I need help, she’d wanted to say. I need to find a way out.

  One afternoon while out hiking Mia found herself at the Jack Straw Tavern. People from the Community were not allowed to frequent the bar; consuming alcohol and mingling with townspeople were both forbidden. Still, Mia found the nerve to peer through the window. A handsome young man bringing out the trash spied her lingering there.

  “I don’t think you’re old enough to drink,” the bartender teased. He could tell Mia was one of the commune kids, they all had a wild, underfed look, and he pitied anyone who lived out on that run-down farm where he’d heard everything was regulated, what you ate, how many hours you slept, who you could speak to. “How about some French fries?” the bartender asked.

  Mia had never heard of them, but she said, “Sure,” and followed him inside. The tavern was dark and comforting, with booths that had leather seats.

  “Coming right up,” the bartender told Mia.

  There was an old gentleman at the bar, having an afternoon beer. He was Max Starr, from an old Blackwell family, and he could never figure out why his cousin Carrie had given away such a large portion of their land. He gathered this young girl was one of the squatters who’d taken over the farm. She had her hair braided in an old-fashioned style and was dressed plainly. Still, she was a pretty girl, and she smiled at him when she caught him staring.

  “My cousin owned land where you live,” he told Mia. “It was in the family for close to three hundred years.”

  “Carrie Oldenfield,” Mia said. “She was a painter.”

  The old man sat back in his chair, surprised by the girl’s knowledge and charm. She didn’t look blank the way most of the Community kids did. “That’s right. She went to the Museum School in Boston, and she studied in Paris, for all the good it did her.”

  “Why didn’t it do her any good?” Mia wanted to know.

  Max Starr snorted, disgusted. “Because she married him.”

  “I’m sorry she died,” Mia said, feeling guilty for reasons she didn’t quite understand.

  “Everybody dies,” Max Starr said. “It was the way she wound up living that was the problem. Lovely girl,” he said. “Second cousin once removed.” He shook his head. “Just goes to show, one man can ruin a good woman’s life.”

  Mia wondered what her mother’s life might have been like if she hadn’t married Joel Davis. She might be west of the moon, someplace where she didn’t have to make herself so plain. At the last Sunday meeting, there had been a complaint about Ivy from the other women in the sewing circle and she had been made to apologize for her misdeeds. Ivy’s crime was to have recited an Emily Dickinson line while they were working on a quilt. I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. Ivy had to walk up to her husband, in front of a gathering of the entire Community, so he could tie a badge on a rope around her neck. It was the letter V, for vanity, to be worn for seven days. As far as Mia was concerned, it hadn’t made Ivy any less beautiful. It just made her hate her father more than she already did.

  When the bartender brought over a plate of fries, along with a bottle of catsup, Mia sat down and proceeded to eat like a starving person. The food was heaven.

  “Slow down there,” Max Starr said as he watched Mia wolfing down the fries. “Don’t they let you eat at that farm?”

  “Boiled potatoes,” Mia said between ravenous bites. “We absolutely don’t have this.”

  “Are they crazy out there?” the old man said.

  “Maybe,” Mia said. She’d never thought of the Community that way before, but now that Max Starr had suggested it, she stopped to consider the way they lived. “I think so.”

  “Well, you don’t seem like one of them,” Max decided, having taken a liking to the girl.

  “What do I seem like?” Mia asked, truly interested in what his answer might be. This was the longest conversation she had ever had with an outsider.

  Max carefully thought over her question before answering. “You seem like a girl who likes French fries.”

  Mia grinned. That’s what she was. An ordinary girl who asked for a second helping and was granted her wish on this one day when she broke the rules and was just like anyone else in town.

  That was when Mia began to think about the other life she might have if she ran away. She thought about it while she weeded the gardens, and in the laundry, where she steam-ironed clothes; and at the preschool, where she worked in the afternoons; and in the office, when she filed bills. She thought about it in the vegetable garden and every time she collected Look-No-Furthers in the orchard. She had begun to plot her getaway, and every time she saw her mother, across a room or on the other side of the field, she would think, Let’s do it together. When the night is dark, when no one can hear us, we will run down the road, we will stop the first car we see, we will never even look back, not once, not for a minute, and before you know it we’ll be west of the moon. Let us walk invisible and disappear.

  * * *

  AT THE END OF the summer, a group of women stumbled upon Mia in the garden. It was the sewing circle hour, and she’d thought she’d be safe, but as it turned out there was a huge crop of tomatoes that had to be picked, and the sewing circle had been canceled. Mia’s heart dropped when she saw them. She had begun to write out an escape plan on a scrap of paper. Go at night. Climb out the window. Travel light. Don’t look back. Take only what you need most of all. Ask Sarah Mott the librarian for money for bus tickets. Meet Ivy in the woods. Run as fast as you can.

  The scent of the tomatoes was fiery and sharp, and the sun was beating down on Mia’s shoulders. When the women from the sewing circle burst through the gate, Mia had already torn up the list to bury in the dark soil. Only one scrap was left, clutched tight in her hand. Mia felt sick to her stomach thinking of what would happen if she were to be found out. She had only faced her father’s wrath once, when she was eight years old and had jumped into a muddy puddle, and she had never misbehaved again. She had been banished to a dark cellar where they kept canned fruits and jam. She’d pounded on the locked door and wailed so terribly for over an hour that at last Ivy had persuaded Joel to forgo any further punishment, vowing that Mia had learned her lesson. But she was older now, and what she’d done was far worse.

  As the women came near, Ivy’s cool gray eyes found Mia. She could tell as soon as she saw her daughter. Something was wrong.

  “Look who’s come to weed even when she isn’t on the schedule,” Evangeline said. Her voice was warm, but she looked at Mia through narrowed eyes. “I always said you were enterprising.”

  Mia did her best to appear calm. She sat with her hands behind her back as the women found their places between the rows of tomatoes, eager to begin harvesting the last of the ripening fruit. She was imagining her punishment when she was caught, the lashes in the field, the locked, dark isolation, the extra work hours, when something brushed against her back. Without glancing at Mia, Ivy took her daughter’s hand and pried it open, then got hold of the last bit of Mia’s list. Run as fast as you can. That was all that was left. Ivy and Mia looked at each other, and as they did, Ivy had a half smile on her face as she popped the scrap into her mouth and swallowed it. Mia had to stop herself from laughing out loud. It seemed that her desire to break the rules had come from somewhere.