Chapter 24: I Accept You

Monday morning I walked into the Ridge Academy lot alone.

Ezra had dropped me at the gate and gone to park.

I had asked him to.

I wanted the first fifty steps to be mine.

My hair hung loose down my back, black and straight, and I had not pinned one strand of it.

The wind was coming from the west, cold and clean, with a smell of pine in it.

It did not make my knees go soft.

It was only wind.

Students stood in clumps by the cars and the buses.

They saw me, and the clumps went quiet one after another along the whole length of the lot.

Nobody laughed.

A few of them lifted their phones.

I knew what they had seen.

Clover had stopped counting the messages at four thousand.

Strangers in three other packs had sent me their own hair, loose, in photos.

I walked on.

A boy by the gym wall called out, half joking, half scared.

"Hey, Harwick!"

I stopped.

I looked at him.

"Merrow," I said.

He swallowed.

"Merrow," he said. "Sorry."

"It's fine."

I kept walking.

Space thirty was ahead of me, the cracked square of asphalt, the faded white line.

I walked to it and stopped on the spot where I had stood on my birthday with a smashed cupcake in my hand.

Nobody told me to stop there.

It was just where my feet went.

I stood on it and looked around.

It was a parking lot.

It was gray and ordinary and smelled of exhaust.

I had expected it to hurt.

It didn't.

"Excuse me?"

A girl had come up beside me.

She was small, a freshman, in a too-big sweatshirt.

She had black hair cut short and olive skin and brown eyes, and she held her backpack in front of her with both arms.

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