Chapter 8: Monday

I lay perfectly still until his breathing went deep again.

Moth.

He had said it into my shoulder, in his sleep, with his hand in my hair.

He said it as if it were safe, because he thought I couldn't hear.

I stared at the ceiling and counted to two hundred.

Then I slid out from under his arm, found my mother's black dress on the floor, and dressed in the dark.

I did not wake him. I left a sticky note on the guitar case that said only, "Thanks for the ride."

I walked the whole way home.

It was four miles.

By the end the sun was coming up behind the laundromat, my feet hurt, and I felt more awake than I ever had.

I stood in the kitchen with the dress still smelling of cedar and thought, calmly, that I was in trouble.

It was supposed to be a plan, and it had felt like the truest thing that ever happened to me.

On Sunday the manager called my mother at home and apologized.

She was back on the schedule that night, and a card was waiting on her locker.

She came home at dawn and hugged me so hard I felt it in my ribs.

"I don't know what you did," she said. "But I'm not going to ask."

"Good."

"But I'll say this once." She held my face. "That boy at the dinner. Hargrove. He stood up."

"I know."

"Be careful what you owe him."

"I don't owe him anything," I said.

I said it, and I hoped it was true.

At school the cafeteria went quiet when I came in.

It was not the old quiet. This one was curious and nervous.

Kids looked up from their trays and then down again.

A girl I had never met said, "Hey, Maisy," in the line.

I took my tray to the table by the window. Cassie had saved me a seat.

Across the room, at the long table under the clock, Drake sat with his lacrosse friends. Teagan sat at his elbow.

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