I Hid My Perfect Score novel · Chapter 23 of 32

Chapter 23: Princess and Witch

I looked at the phone in Mom's hand, with its pink case and its cracked corner.

Paisley without her phone wasn't running away.

She was hiding.

"Home," I said.

Mom shook her head hard.

"She'd never go home like this. Not with the neighbors watching."

"Not the house," I said. "The park at the end of our street. The castle."

Gavin looked up from the arm of Dad's chair.

"The wooden one?"

"She always went up the tower when she lost."

Mom opened her mouth to argue.

Dad stood up and held out his car keys.

"Take my car," he said. "I'll stay with your mother."

Mom looked at the keys in his hand.

Emory drove.

I sat in the passenger seat of my father's sedan and watched Massachusetts go by green and wet.

Two hours.

Neither of us said much.

Once, at a toll plaza, he reached over and put his hand on my knee and left it there.

The park was still the same.

A patch of grass, two swings, and the wooden castle the parents built the year we started kindergarten.

It had a tower with one square window, a rope bridge, and a yellow slide that burned your legs in summer.

The hedge game started in our yard.

But on weekends it moved here, because the castle had a real tower.

A pink suitcase sat at the bottom of the slide.

In the tower window, a face looked out and then ducked away.

"I'll be at the car," Emory said. "Wave if you need me."

"I won't need you."

"Everyone says that."

I crossed the wet grass.

"Paisley."

Nothing.

"I'm coming up."

"You're not allowed up here," she said from inside the tower. "You were never allowed up here."

"I know."

I climbed the ladder anyway.

The tower was smaller than I remembered.

Paisley was sitting in the corner with her knees up, still in the white sweater from the hearing, her coat bunched around her.

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