Chapter 22: No

"No," I said again, to be sure he heard it.

Drake stood very still on the gravel. The gym lights made a long yellow stripe across his shoes.

"Okay," he said.

"You don't get to say okay like it's a door you're opening for me."

"I'm not."

"For three months you picked everything. When we talked. What I knew. Who you were."

I was shaking, and I held on to the words so they wouldn't shake with me.

"I got to be the girl you wanted," I said. "Then the girl you hated."

"Then the girl who killed your brother, then the girl you were sorry to," Drake said.

"That isn't..."

"I don't know who I am when you're not deciding it. I want to find out."

He nodded slowly.

"You can't sleep on our couch tonight," I said. "Your mother would find you somewhere. She'd find you anywhere."

"Maisy."

"I'm not punishing you. I just can't have you in the next room and think."

"Okay," he said again, quietly, as if he finally understood.

He walked out of the lot alone, down the long drive in his one dark suit, and I did not call him back.

On Monday morning I came to school an hour early, because I could not sleep, and I found him in the cafeteria kitchen.

He was standing at the industrial sink in a white apron, with his sleeves pushed up and the water running.

A stack of gray trays sat on the steel counter beside him.

The woman who ran the kitchen, a large patient woman who had taught me how to run the machine, looked at me over his shoulder.

"He asked for your old job," she said. "Six o'clock, every weekday, and Saturdays. I told him it paid minimum."

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