Chapter 6: Bell Creek

My mother called before I'd finished reading the comments.

"Baby," she said, and then she was crying too hard to talk.

"Mom. Mom, breathe."

"A lady from church sent it to me. Both of them. The dance one and the truck one." She blew her nose. "Joni, what is happening up there?"

I sat on the floor of my room with my back against the bed.

"It's not what it looks like."

"Then what does it look like? Because it looks like what people said about me."

That one landed somewhere under my ribs.

"I'm going to send you something," I said. "Don't watch it at work. Don't watch it in front of him. And don't say anything to anyone."

I sent her Jordyn's video.

The whole thing.

I heard her play it on speaker.

I heard Corey's voice come out of my mother's phone in our old kitchen.

"Like mother, like daughter."

She stopped it there.

For a long time she didn't say anything at all.

"Okay," she said finally, in a voice I'd never heard her use. "Okay."

An hour later my stepfather texted us both.

He'd never once texted me in nine years.

"Sunday dinner. Both of you. Five o'clock. Not optional."

Corey drove.

I sat up front because I was the boss.

Crew sat in the back with his long legs folded sideways, because his dad lived next door and he had no other ride home.

For the first twenty miles nobody spoke.

Then I turned around.

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