It was the little things that counted, really. She knew that better than most. Take away just a few colors from the crayon box, and you couldn’t complete a rainbow. Lose Barbie’s shoes and her ensemble just wasn’t complete. Take the marshmallows out of your morning Lucky Charms and it might as well be Raisin Bran. If your left sock was always a different color than the right, you were a mismatched dork. If your clothes were noticeably dirtier than the other kids’, they made loud, snorting pig noises behind your back. Never to your face. If you used big words and liked the library you were a nerd. A loser. If you didn’t have parents you were an orphan. Or a bastard, depending on who you asked. Yes, she knew better than most. The little things mattered. They added up. People could (and often did, in her experience), ignore the big things. It was the little things – an itchy bug bite, a dull throb in the bones, a faint, insistent noise – people couldn’t deal with. The little things were nagging, they accumulated and amplified until a person’s reaction was disproportionate to what they were reacting against.

That’s why she started off doing small things. Little things. Something no one would notice unless they took the time to look. And adults rarely looked. One morning she picked up a dirty pair of boxers Mr. Donaghue had left on his bedroom floor and put them in his hamper. Another time she unloaded the dishwasher when Mrs. Donaghue was out running errands. She moved the phonebook from its place buried beneath piles of placemats in the drawer of the china hutch, and laid it neatly by the phone in the kitchen, because Mr. Donaghue was always complaining that he couldn’t find the goddamn thing. Every now and then she would clean the hairs out of Mrs. Donaghue’s hairbrush. Whenever she came across Mrs. Donaghue’s reading glasses, she would set them on her nightstand, because Mrs. Donaghue was always losing them.

The key was to keep it subtle, keep them from thinking about it. As was so often the case with little things, it had to be subliminal. Unconscious. Noticeable only in the most indefinable sense of the word – like the sound of passing cars to the ears of a city dweller, or the ocean’s waves to that of a deep sea fisher. She needed to be that noise, living on the periphery, only half felt. All she wanted the Donaghues to feel was that, in some vague way, their lives were the better for her being there.

At the moment she was lying atop the twin sized bed the Donaghues had purchased for her room-that-used-to-be-an-office. Another hand-me-down in a life filled with the secondhand. Secondhand clothes, secondhand books, secondhand rooms, secondhand people. It was always the secondhand places that had the loudest voice. Hurt her ears. But this room was different than the others. The Donaghues were different than the others. They had really tried. They had painted the room the palest of yellows, the walls sporadically dotted with white daisies. The quilt covering her bed was new, a patchwork of green, beige, and yellow squares. It always smelt of laundry soap. Mr. Donaghue had mounted white bookshelves on her wall. He had even gone so far as to attach glow-in-the-dark stars to her ceiling, directly over her bed. She wondered if those were secondhand, too, or if they were completely self-contained, intact in a way that secondhand things never were. Even now, they glowed faintly green in the darkness of early morning, ghostly little creatures watching her watch the darkness.

She liked the Donaghues. They were a nice couple. Middle-aged. Dependable. Mr. Donaghue had a healthy mess of black hair on his head, a constant five o’clock shadow, and dark blue eyes that crinkled into crow’s feet when he laughed. Mrs. Donaghue was, despite her appearance, a number of years younger than her husband. You would never know it by looking at her sandy brown hair riddled with strands of grey, and her spidery, veined hands, and her lips that had a tendency to frown without her permission. But Mrs. Donaghue always seemed happy to see her, was always ready with an encouraging word, was always willing to sit with her for hours at the kitchen table and help her with her homework.

“This time will be different,” she muttered to the stars above her head. “The little things. They’ll amount. They always do. It’s just not everyone is smart enough to see them. But you probably knew that already, didn’t you?” She arched her neck and shoulders backwards until the very top of her skull rested against the mattress. She eyed the stars thoughtfully from this new angle. “You probably see lots of things up there, huh? Lots of stupid things. You would know. But the Donaghues are smart. They’ll see the difference.”

She had learned a few things over the years. Every move to a new home was just another opportunity to observe and to modify. She watched the families she was placed with meticulously, sometimes for weeks on end, until she knew their habits, their routines, the miniscule, quotidian things they probably didn’t even know about themselves. She made note of things – what they seemed to expect from her, who they wanted her to be, what role they wanted her to fill in their lives. There was always a role. And then she modified. There was a method to it, really. She started with the little things – her habits, her speech, her style of dress, her body language – and then she adopted and adapted until she was a new version of herself. The problem was always how to leave behind the old. So after a few years she started giving herself new names for each home. Each respective foster family either didn’t know the lie for what it was, or they didn’t particularly care. Her case worker just thought she was being “cute”. A whole new person for a whole new family.

Who had she been in the past? She couldn’t remember anymore. There was a four-month stint as Celia, eight as Josie, three as Anna, almost a year as Rebecca, and one ill-fated week as Kelly. She was sure there had been more, but she supposed it didn’t really matter now.

Testing the weight of her new name on her tongue, she whispered to the stars on her ceiling, “Willow.” She hoped the Donaghues knew that her name was not secondhand.

She remembered the exact moment she had picked that name. It had started with an old placement, back when she was five, or eight, maybe. A bright Saturday afternoon. Her foster father had been in the backyard, wielding a shovel against an obstinate tree stump that wouldn’t give no matter how much he dug at its roots. Eventually he had been forced to hire someone to come and remove it. Yet even the professional had had to use a jackhammer. It had taken him hours. She remembered marveling at the tree stump’s resolve. How could something be so solid, so unshakeable? How deep were its roots? Twenty feet? Fifty? Long enough to grow clear through the earth’s crust? She couldn’t remember how many layers of rock and dirt there were before the center of the world – her current teacher, Mrs. Spencer, hadn’t made geology all that interesting – but she was sure if anything could have reached it, it would have been that tree stump.

She wondered if what she was feeling was jealousy. It was hard to say. What might it be like, she wondered, to be so stable. So deeply rooted in one place that it took a jackhammer to get you out. How was it possible? The question didn’t bother her so much as it made her antsy, filled her with a fierce, angry giddiness. She went to the library and checked out an arborist encyclopedia. She finally cracked open her science book and read up on photosynthesis. She looked things up on the internet. She read about a wild fig tree that had been discovered in South Africa with roots 400 feet long. She read about a redwood tree in California that was thought to be 12,000 years old. She learned that if you wanted to know the true age of a tree, you had to count its rings. There was something tantalizing about that idea, about having to see inside a thing to know its real age. She wondered, if someone were to peel away her skin and pry through her insides, how old she might be. How many rings did her lungs have? Her liver, her heart?

It was when she was in the car with her case manager, Anita, on her way to meet the Donaghues’ for the first time, that she decided she would like to be a tree.

“So, Sophie – that is what you’re calling yourself now, right?” Anita asked her with that cheerful condescension adults only used with children and small animals.

She thought she might like to be a redwood. They got to live for so long.

“I think you’ll really like the Donaghues, Sophie. They’re very nice people. Mr. Donaghue is a journalist, and Mrs. Donaghue is an art dealer. Isn’t that exciting?”

Or maybe a dogwood. Dogwood trees had the prettiest blossoms.

“You’ll have your own room and everything! Mrs. Donaghue painted it herself.”

Aspens were nice. She could be an aspen. A quaking aspen, maybe. They turned the most amazing colors in the fall, as if they could no longer contain the flame of their own existence.

“Now, sweetie, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something. Something serious, alright?”

Evergreens were good, sturdy trees. They kept their color all year round. Some people used them for Christmas trees. She liked Christmas.

“I’ve been a bit concerned about your, er… stories. I think it’s lovely that you’re so imaginative. Creativity is a gift! But sometimes, dear, they start to get, ah, eccentric, and I worry that you may be taking it a bit too far.”

Maybe a maple tree. She wasn’t overly fond of maple syrup, but she liked the leaves. They were always recognizable, always distinct within the tandem of their kind.

“You’ll want to make a good impression on the Donaghues, won’t you? Show them what a sweet little girl you are. Talk of your imaginary friends and, what do you call them? ‘Past lives’? Well, it might be a bit too intense for your first meeting, don’t you think, sweetheart? And you might want to consider using your real name.”

She finally looked at Anita, her wild frizz of a head and her eyebrows that were too thin. She would have told her that her new name was Willow, except that trees didn’t talk.

Anita glanced at herself in her rearview mirror before flicking her eyes to Willow and then back again. “You’re awfully quiet. You nervous? Listen, sweetie, don’t worry too much, alright? This is just the first meeting. There’s still some wiggle room if you decide you don’t like them, but I don’t think that will be an issue. Just be yourself, and I’ll be right there with you.”

Willow would have rolled her eyes if trees had been accustomed to doing such things.

Fifteen minutes later they were pulling into the long, shrub-lined driveway that led to the Donaghues’ house. “Alright, kiddo,” Anita said with a wink and a smile, “we’re here.”

Willow wasn’t entirely prepared for the jittery fluttering in her stomach. Did trees have stomachs? she wondered as the car came to a halt and Anita started unbuckling her seatbelt. Willow hadn’t been a tree long enough to know proper tree decorum for making new acquaintances. All she could do was close her eyes, breathe deeply, and think, ‘I am a tree.’

*~*~*

It had been nearly six months that she’d been with the Donaghues. They said they liked her name, Willow, that it suited her. She knew she had chosen the right one. Every day, when Mr. Donaghue would pick her up from school, he would ask her about her day. He would ask her what books she was reading, and if she had made any new friends at school, and what did she want for dinner the next night? Once he asked her, if she could pick any topic, what she would like him to write an article about. She suspected he wasn’t really going to write it, but she appreciated being asked.

It had been four months since she’d started her daily ritual. Find a little, nice thing to do. Do it. Make the house seem a better place now that she was in it. Make them like her. Make them want to keep her. So far it seemed to be working. The Donaghues were always nice to her. She wondered if it was because they liked willow trees, and if so, which kind? The weeping willow? The white willow? The corkscrew willow?

In the early morning darkness, she lay and talked with her neon green stars. She thought maybe they would appreciate talking to someone instead of just spying on them. Hours seemed to pass in sluggish boredom (the stars weren’t very good conversationalists), yet she was sure it couldn’t have been more than half an hour. Trick of the early morning. Time dragged when you waited for daylight.

Slowly, in stages of cognizance, like morning fog creeping in from the depths of night, Willow became aware of hushed, whispered voices seeping through the walls of her room from the adjoining bedroom. Intrigued, as the Donaghues usually slept like the dead at this time of the morning, Willow slowly slipped out of bed and tiptoed into the hall. Their door was ajar. With a curious smile about her lips, she crouched against the wall beside the doorframe.

“Carrie,” she heard Mr. Donaghue say, “you need to give it more time.”

“Keith.” Willow almost didn’t recognize the voice of Mrs. Donaghue. It was more of a whimper than a word, the keen of a wounded, desperate animal. “I’ve tried. I’ve tried. You have to know I have!”

She heard a shushing sound. “I know you have. But six months… dear, it’s just not enough time to know.”

“I know.”

“Carrie –”

There was a choke, a gasp. More keening. Willow felt the sound, it burrowed into her body and ripped through her stomach lining like acid.

“Keith, I just… I just can’t do it anymore.”

“It will get better,” came the soft reply. “It will get easier the more time you spend with her.”

A dry laugh. “Are you hearing yourself? ‘It’ll get easier'? Who are you trying to fool?”

“Carrie.” Sharpened tone. “Please. This has to stop. What happened with Lil…”

“Don’t.” More sharpness, more hardness. “You hear me? Don’t.”

“You’ve got to pull yourself together.”

“Look, you know I care for her, you know I do. But it just… it isn’t working. She’s a sweet girl, but sometimes…”

“So she’s a bit different. It’s not a bad thing.”

“It’s not just that she’s different, Keith!” Yelling, sharpness. Didn’t they know not to play with sharp things? “She’s different and she’s not ours.”

“We’ve talked about this.”

“Not enough. Why can’t we try again?” Her voice nearly pleading. “We never explored all our options before. With today’s technology, there’s no reason we can’t have one of our own.”

“We tried before. We tried and it didn’t work. No, listen to me! We agreed that this was the best option for now.”

“No, we agreed this would be a trial run.”

“A trial run? Is that really what you think she is?”

“No, of course not…”

‘The weeping willow,’ Willow thought from her place crouched against the doorframe. ‘One of the first trees to leaf in the spring.’

“Look,” whispered Mrs. Donaghue’s voice, “I’m just not sure this is the best. For her or for us.”

‘The weeping willow is deciduous,’ thought Willow around the lump in her throat, ‘but it’s the last tree to lose its leaves in the fall.’ She slid down the wall until her rump hit the floor.

“It will always be hard, Carrie. Do you think it will stop when she leaves?”

“No,” came the response, weighted, dead. “It will never leave.”

‘The bark of the weeping willow is often used for medicinal purposes,’ Willow closed her eyes and thought forcefully.

“I’m just trying to do what’s right, Keith. I feel for her, and I care for her, really I do. But I can’t do it. I can’t handle it. Every day, seeing her, hearing her… and the room, Keith. She’s in that room.”

‘The weeping willow can only thrive in moist areas, like creek banks,’ Willow thought even more loudly, hoping that by the very force of her thoughts she could drown the lump that seemed to be choking her.

Mr. Donaghue was quiet for so long that Mrs. Donaghue whimpered again. “Keith, please…”

“It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. She’s been through enough.”

“So have we! Is it really any more right for us to keep her? Damaged parents for a damaged kid? How do you think she’ll feel when she finds out why she’s here? She’s smart, Keith. She’ll figure it out sooner or later, and what do you think that will do to her?”

Silence. Willow wondered how silence had the power to hurt.

“Alright, Carrie, look… I’m not promising anything, but… I’ll give Anita a call tomorrow, maybe we can –”

‘I am a tree,’ Willow thought as she laid her head on the floor outside the Donaghues’ bedroom. ‘My roots are 400 feet deep.’

I am a tree.

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A/N: Revised version. Constructive criticism would still be very appreciated, as it's a lot different from what I usually write, and well... I'm not entirely sure what I think of it yet.