March 1 3326 Holston Drive, Bristol, Tennessee Miles hiked today: 0 (so far) Total miles hiked on the Appalachian Trail: 0 Weather: bright, mid-50s, very windy

I went through my pack one more time.

Sleeping bag, pad, tent, stove. Fuel, food bag, toothbrush, towel. Extra shorts, shirt, tights, fleece jacket, one each. Extra socks, sock liners, underwear, two pairs each. Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap. Maps for the first leg. One small notebook, a few handwritten lists, and a photograph of Springer.

I tightened the drawstring and lifted the pack carefully onto my shoulders, then fastened it around my hips and across my chest. Fully loaded, the pack weighed 33 pounds on the bathroom scale. Fully dressed, I weighed 115. That was counting my boots, which were nearly a pound apiece.

It was a Wednesday. I should have been in school. I looked around my room. Pink walls--we painted them when I was seven. Flowered bedspread, the bed neatly made. My soccer ball, the only thing I wished I could take but couldn't, and the trophies and the posters and the dolls. Everything painfully neat, dusted, wiped clean. I looked around and thought, It should not be so easy for a twelve-year-old girl to run away.

But it was.

I clicked the door shut and went across the darkened hall and down the stairs. Sometimes our house seemed like a museum, full of stuff but not a place where people actually lived. The kitchen was antiseptic. Mom scrubbed when she couldn't sleep at night. Lately that was most of the time.

I paused in the foyer and hit the Record button on the answering machine. I cleared my throat. "Look, Mom, it's me, Dani," I said, in what I hoped was the right sort of voice, half a...