Текст книги "Endless Summer"

Автор книги: Jennifer Echols

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

He took a deep breath and let out a slow sigh. “It’s been a long time since I’ve sat outside at night,” he said. “Well, it seems like a long time. I guess it was only three weeks ago, on your birthday, in my Secret Make-Out Hideout.”

“That fateful night,” I said ruefully.

“I forgot how loud it is out here,” he said.

We listened for a long time, and I stroked his foot with my toe.

“And how many layers,” I finally said. “A low hum on the bottom, then a medium, then a high hum. at’s the background. en there’s the croaking, like a chanting, and every few seconds a chirp.” I moved my toe to the underside of his foot, where he was ticklish.

Now he jerked away, but he still didn’t take the hint and scoot in my direction.

I reached over and slid my hand underneath his shirt.

e hard muscles of his stomach jumped at my touch. I almost laughed—not because it was funny, but because I was so overwhelmed with surprise that I could make his body react like that.

“If you could draw this sound,” I said, “it would look like the surface of the lake when you dribble water into it. A circle around a drop.” I put my fingers together on his skin, then expanded them outward, trailing my fingertips. “Another circle.” I moved my fingers and expanded them out. “Another circle.” I moved my fingers. “And lines between them, as you move the water drops from one place to another on the surface.” I dragged my finger up his stomach to his chest.

He gasped.

I did laugh out loud this time. “Sorry.”

He put his hand on top of my hand, with only his T-shirt between them. “Don’t be sorry.” en he slid his hand across his chest, onto my shirt, and ventured underneath. He did this very cautiously, probably waiting for me to hit him. I did not.

“I hear what you mean about the circles.” He drew expanding circles with his fingertips in different places on my tummy, just as I’d done to him. “And the lines. But to me, it wouldn’t look like the surface of the lake. It would look like fireworks.” He dragged one finger from the waistband of my shorts upward, dipping into my belly button and out again. A bottle rocket shooting off.

My whole body was going up in flames as I watched him in the candlelight. Any second he would lean forward to kiss me, and it would be a doozy.

Instead he asked, “Do you remember this?” Sitting up again, he reached behind a pillow and pulled out a weathered wooden sign that had hung over the ladder years ago.

The letters we’d scratched with a pocketknife were still visible.

“Oh my God.” I laughed. “KEEP OUT JERKS. You remember that day?”

“Of course I remember,” he said. “Sean told us that we couldn’t play, and McGillicuddy and Cameron sided with him—”

“I hated when they ganged up on us,” I mused.

“—and usually we did what they said and hung around them like abused dogs. is time we said to hell with them and came here. We made this sign and nailed it to the tree.”

“And then we waited for them to notice we were gone and come looking for us,” I said. “ey would see that we were the cool ones and they were the ones excluded, and they would rue the day, I tell you!” I thought for a moment. “And we ate Double Stuf Oreos out of the bag and talked, and finally we went home. ey never did miss us and I doubt they rued the day, but it was a nice afternoon.” I thought again. “Do you have any Double Stuf Oreos?” He gave me a reproving look. I wished I hadn’t said this, because now it seemed like I didn’t appreciate everything else he’d brought.

I started, “I’m just jok—”

He reached beneath a pillow and dragged out a package of Double Stuf Oreos.

Frances had never bought Double Stuf Oreos for McGillicuddy and me. One stuff was enough, she said. All we got was single-stuff whole-wheat faux Oreos from the organic grocery store. I would not swear to it, but I’d bet the stuff was made of tofu. Mrs. Vader, in contrast, did not go to such pains for her family, or perhaps she was just tired. This would have made her home a very attractive place for me to hang out even if there had been no boys. With boys and Oreos, it was heaven.

I lifted the chocolate lid and dug into the icing. “Mmmmmm,” I said. It was even better than I remembered. Mmmmmm, I put the rest of it in my mouth and shamefully, I might have forgotten Adam was sitting there, until I looked up and noticed he was watching me. “Wha?” I asked around cookie.

“You look like you are really enjoying that Oreo.”

Embarrassed, I swallowed. “I beg your pardon. I have been living on an athletic training diet of microwave pizza and Frances’s muscadine chutney from five years ago.”

“Is chutney supposed to age? Yikes.” He munched his own cookie and scooted the bag closer to me. “Have another.” I dug into the bag and munched on a second cookie, happily looking around our dark, cozy nest in the flickering candlelight. “e tree house seems smaller,” I said. “You seem bigger.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.”

“But the Double Stuf Oreos taste exactly the same.” My voice cracked from a crumb caught in my throat. I might need to bail out of the tree house and drink from the lake.

“I’m sure they have very good quality control.” en the boy who Never Planned Ahead dug under yet another pillow to produce two bottles of water. He always brought two, I’d noticed. Either he was afraid of my cooties, or he knew I was afraid of his cooties, ever since the time years ago when Sean spit in my Coke.

“ank you so much,” I croaked. As I sipped the cold water, I eyed him. Except for the beard, he looked relaxed and innocent, which was not like him at all. “So, what’s the occasion?”

“What do you mean?” he asked too quickly. “I wanted to see you. I’ve been dying to see you.”

“Right, but normally you would just spontaneously drag me into the woods. If you’ve engineered all this, something’s up.” He blinked innocently at me for a few more seconds, then gave in. “Okay. It’s about the plan.”

“Your plan for us to run away to Montgomery? Let me guess. You’ve decided we can stay in the tree house and live on Double Stuf Oreos instead.” I slid my hand onto his thigh. “That’s actually not a bad idea.”

He looked at my hand. “No, it’s about your plan to change your dad’s mind about me.” He picked up my hand. “I have something important I want to ask you.” He kissed my hand. “You know, when you were out with Parker and Cameron, I got angry.”

“You brought me here and wined and dined me”—I nodded toward the Oreos—“just to tell me this? Your temper is not news.” He put our hands under his chin and locked eyes with me. “Sean’s next, isn’t he?”

He seemed so earnest, I didn’t want to leave this question hanging in the air. I wanted to reassure him. But I didn’t want to lie to him, either. He would have seen through it, anyway. He already did. Sean was my last resort, if only I could figure out a way to use him.

“Don’t go out with Sean,” Adam said. “Stop the plan. Just give your dad some time to cool down, like my parents wanted. Maybe we won’t have the rest of the summer together. But in the fall, I’ll do my best on the football team. Everybody loves football players, right? We seem so all-American and wholesome.” I took back my hand. “College football players have been involved in a rash of shootings.”

“We’ll worry about that later. This is high school, and I can be the hometown darling if Coach lets me start as quarterback.”

“What are the chances of that?” I asked. “I mean, I have every confidence in you, but you have to get past that rising senior with a sixty percent completion rate in last year’s postseason.”

He just looked at me. Most boys seem taken aback when I spout sports statistics, as if girls aren’t allowed to keep up with that sort of thing. Not Adam. He was used to me. He was staring at me because he was honestly trying to convince me his own plan would work.

“I have every confidence in you,” I repeated.

He huffed out a breath through his nose like he didn’t believe me. “Plus, I swear I will not get put on academic probation this year. I will make the minimum GPA for eligibility. I might even stay a tenth of a point or two ahead.”

“A 2.2?” I asked. “Gosh, Adam, don’t put yourself out.”

“I’m serious, Lori. I will be a model citizen all semester long, and by Christmas surely your dad will let us be together, if you’ll just forget about your plan. And Sean.”

“And we wouldn’t see each other all that time?” I contemplated a whole summer and fall without him. We were supposed to spend the Fourth of July together. He would start as quarterback in the fall, like he said, and I was supposed to go with him to parties after games. And what about the homecoming dance?

He shook his head. “We would sacrifice the short-term for the long-term goal. We would be obedient.”

“Like dogs.” I hadn’t forgotten his woof at my dad.

“Something like that.”

“I think my plan would be better. A lot faster.”

“I’m not playing.” He took my hand again. “Tell me you’ll wait for me. Please.”

I probably would have tried to talk him out of it if I’d thought he was just jealous of Sean. I mean, honestly, higher than a rock-bottom C average? Adam? at would require him to make a B in something. But there was more to it than that. He lifted his chin when he talked about my dad being proud of him and our whole town worshipping the ground he walked on. He didn’t just want to get out of this awful sitch we were in. He wanted to earn his way out.

I swallowed and said, “Okay.”

“Okay?” He hunched down so his face was even with mine and looked straight into my eyes. “Really?”

“Really.” My stomach hurt when I said it.

He sighed. His whole body went limp with relief on the sleeping bag. “Thank you. You won’t be sorry. Now, there’s one more thing.”

“Oreos are poisonous? en I’m screwed.” I laughed. “Hey, then it really would be like Romeo and Juliet, if we both ate poisonous cookies and died here in your tree house together.”

He stared blankly at me.

“Adam. Everybody has to read Romeo and Juliet. Did you flunk ninth grade English?”

“I made a D-minus. No, that’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say, I was so happy that night we made out, and I’ve been kicking myself since then that we fell asleep. Now we won’t get any more time together until Christmas, maybe not then, maybe…” Not ever. I was afraid that’s what he was thinking. I didn’t say it.

His chest rose and fell with a deep breath. “Before we say good-bye, I want a do-over of that night. Just this one last night with you.” He leaned over me. My body sparked again, like a match held to fuel that burst into flame all over. He pressed down on me. I leaned up to meet him. Our mouths met for that doozy of a kiss I’d been waiting for.

For a few minutes we enjoyed what we’d been missing. He drew back, trailing short kisses across my cheek, into my hairline. He whispered in my ear, “I love you, Lori.” I reached down and found his warm hand, calloused from wakeboarding and yard work and bottle-rocket burns. I rubbed my thumb in his palm and turned my head so I could look into his light blue eyes, which seemed to glow in the candlelight and the dark. “I love you, too.” He winced. He blinked. This was about to go very bad, because Adam was going to cry. “I miss you,” he said, and his voice broke.

“I’m not gone yet.” I could hardly bear the thought of being without him until Christmas or after, but seeing him cry would be even worse. So I pushed him down into the softness of the sleeping bag and tried to make him forget.

“Still alive?” I asked him an hour and a half later.

He chuckled. By now we’d been in the tree house so long that I’d become nocturnal, like the foxes who used to hang out here. e candle had burned low, but I could still see every curve of his face and every golden hair in his baby beard as he lay on his side, watching me. The worry lines between his brows were gone.

I touched the space where the lines had been, then took my hand away. “I’d better go. I wouldn’t want to miss my curfew.”

“You make no sense whatsoever,” he said, but he must have agreed with me, because he sat up and ran his hands back through his hair to detangle his curls.

“It’s the principle of the thing. I’m coming home before curfew, as I discussed with my dad. He simply does not know who I was with. Or that I was out at all. Details.” I waved them away.

He caught my hand and shook it, the deceptively basic first move in the secret handshake we’d started when we were in first grade. “One last time?” We shook hands upside down, with a twist, high five, low five, pinky swear, elbows touching.

“And add this.” He traced the tips of his thumb and finger across my lips, zipping them. “Keep your mouth shut, and I promise to keep mine shut. With football stardom and my GPA in the bag, we’ll be dating again before you know it.”

“Sounds like a plan.” I rolled over to the ladder and climbed down, reluctantly watching our cozy nest disappear above my head. Adam didn’t bother with the ladder. He jumped down beside me and took my hand. We walked through the dark forest like nothing was wrong.

And nothing was. We would stay apart. My dad would come to his senses. We would get back together. But this future was predicated on Adam starting as quarterback, keeping up his grades, and generally making good. As McGillicuddy had said on the sad morning after my birthday, Sometimes what Adam intends to do and what he actually does are two different things.

“I worry,” I admitted.

“Why do you worry?” Adam’s voice came from above me. He’d been taller than me since fourth grade or so, and I’d never gotten used to it.

“You like a challenge,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You like danger.”

“Sorry.”

We reached the edge of my yard, as close as I dared come to my house without fear of being overheard. I turned to him and said softly, “I worry that you’ll lose interest in me now that I’m not a dangerous challenge.”

He stroked the back of my hand with his thumb. “You are the one way I’m normal. When I’m with you, I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong with me.”

“There’s not anything wrong with you. You’re high-spirited.”

“I sound like a horse.”

“You are like a horse.” He was exactly like a colt incessantly dashing around the paddock and leaping away from the fence for no apparent reason.

“Like a stallion?” He pressed his lips together, trying not to laugh. He was so adorable.

“That’s a good note to say good-bye on,” I said. “I will remember you just like this, feeling your oats—”

“Ha!”

“—and whinnying about yourself.”

“Good.” Gently he kissed my forehead. Then he squeezed my hand and let me go.

With a deep sigh of regret, I walked toward my house alone, looking up at my bedroom window. After about ten feet I stopped, turned around, and walked back to where Adam still stood. “How do I get back inside?”

He closed his eyes. Probably he was counting to ten, which was very mature of him—and I would have been proud of his self-control, except that it meant I had screwed up.

He opened his eyes. “You are mine,” he said slowly, “and you are blonde, and I love you, but damn. You get back inside by using your key.” I licked my lips. “What key?”

“The house key you put in your pocket before you jumped out your window.”

I glanced behind me at my house, which suddenly loomed like a haunted mansion, monsters lurking inside. Widower monsters with OCD. “I need to work on this disobedience thing, because I am not good at it.” I could still joke with Adam, but my heart raced. “What do I do? Can you pick the lock?”

“I can’t pick the dead bolt. Use the spare key hidden under a fake rock in the flower bed.” ough his words were reasonable, I could hear the same rising panic in them that I felt.

“We don’t have a fake rock,” I said tightly. “My dad works with criminals and thinks he has a bead on them. Burglars know all about the fake rock. Besides, he’s sitting with Frances in the den. No matter what, he’ll hear me when I unlock the door.”

“Wait out here with me until McGillicuddy comes home and sneak in with him,” Adam said.

Now that was a good idea. McGillicuddy would protest, but he wouldn’t really rat me out when it meant such dire consequences for Adam. I was so relieved! I grabbed Adam in a bear hug.

The kitchen door swung wide open at the same time all the outside lights flicked on, blinding us.

I jumped away from Adam.

“LORI ELIZABETH McGILLICUDDY!” my dad roared.

“The hounds caught us after all,” Adam said calmly.

“Adam!” I whispered. “Run!”

“No,” he said in a normal voice, even though we could hear my dad stomping toward us through the pine needles and the blinding light. “I’m not hiding from him. I won’t let you take the fall for this.”

“There won’t be a fall. If he doesn’t see you, he’ll have no idea I was with you. I’ll tell him I just wanted to go for a walk by myself on a beautiful summer night.”

“Out your window? Anyway, he’s seen me already.”

“Well, he has now.” I raised my voice to a normal tone, too, now that we were busted yet again.

Dad’s silhouette loomed in front of us. Frances’s was farther back, still in the garage, allowing her man to take care of family business. I felt a stab of anger at her for refusing to help Adam and me in the first place.

But it was pointless now. My dad hardly glanced at me. Focusing on Adam, he waved in the direction of the Vaders’ house. He didn’t prod Adam with a shotgun, but that was the overall effect.

I could tell from the looks on both their faces that Adam was going to military school.

I woke the next morning and stared at the ceiling, searching for a reason to get out of bed. Why should I go to work? If I was a no-show, my parents couldn’t do anything worse than send me to military school. And I didn’t need any money where I was going.

On the other hand, I could add to my stash, and the day before I was supposed to go to school, I could steal Lori and run away—not to Montgomery, but all the way to Mexico. If only it weren’t for her lame idea that she needed to finish high school.

Lucky for my parents and their minimum-wage labor force, I’d always had a hard time staying in bed, or staying anywhere, for that matter. So I hauled my ass up and ran downstairs to breakfast.

e second I walked in, I wished I hadn’t. My mom had spread military school brochures in front of her breakfast plate—the one that had been pinned to the bulletin board in the office for months, plus others for schools in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Virginia—so she must have been looking forward to getting rid of me for quite some time.

en, when we walked down to her office in the warehouse, she called in a couple of the full-time employees and arranged for them to hold down the fort next week while she and Dad toured these schools. She never mentioned touring them with me. My opinion didn’t matter.

“And just in case you decide to go hog wild with Lori while we’re gone next week,” she told me when we were alone in the office again and she was giving me gas, “just remember that some of these schools have a summer session. I’m sure they’d be willing to enroll you right now instead of waiting for August.” I slammed out of the office—oh, I was supposed to have learned to respect my parents through all this?—and walked down the endless wooden staircase to the floating dock with the gas pumps.

I stood looking out at the wide lake with mist slowly rising into the white sky. e mist would burn off to reveal deep blue by seven thirty. Another perfect summer day.

I walked up the stairs again, just because I couldn’t stand there on the dock any longer and there was nowhere else to go.

I walked down the stairs, because I’d catch hell from my dad if I stayed away from my post very long.

Half an hour later, just as the last of the mist lifted, Lori trolled the wakeboarding boat slowly out of the marina and nosed it against the pads on the floating dock. She jumped out and tied the rope to the cleat. As she bent over, I decided this was the worst punishment of all: watching this forbidden girl in my cutoff jeans.

She peeked at me between her legs. Her long ponytail touched the dock. “You’re pacing like a caged tiger.”

“So? Nobody gives a shit.”

“Yes they do. The whole warehouse is talking about it. Your dad has been watching you through his binoculars.” If things had been different in my family, I might have thought this meant they were feeling sorry for me and my parents might change their minds about bundling me off to school. But I knew better. They watched and pointed at me like a curiosity, one that would be safely sent away from them soon enough.

Or even sooner. “If they’re watching me, I can’t talk to you,” I told her.

She straightened and faced me. “Why not? You’re already as good as enrolled in military school.”

“If I screw up again, they’ll send me now. As it is, they’ll wait until August.”

Her eyes widened, then narrowed. “I actually need gas,” she said. “I need you to give me gas. Can’t a girl get gas around here?” She was shouting at me for no reason. Or, she was shouting for a very good reason, but she wasn’t really shouting about getting gas, and she wasn’t really shouting at me.

What the hell. I took the nozzle from the pump and shoved it into the tank of the boat. It was a legitimate reason and a perfect excuse to exchange a few words with her.

But I looked into her sad green eyes and could think of absolutely nothing to say.

Lori could. “August. Football practice starts in August. You’ll miss it.”

I couldn’t stand to look at her anymore. e digital numbers ticked by on the gas pump as I said, “I don’t think you quite understand. I’ll miss football in general.

Period.”

“They don’t have football at military school?”

“I seriously doubt it. They probably have varsity latrine digging.”

“Boarding school. I can’t believe your parents are sending you away to boarding school. I thought that only happened in e Sound of Music .” She heaved a sigh big enough that I turned to look at her again. She watched a heron cruise low over the lake and dip its talons beneath the surface. It brought out a wriggling fish with nowhere to hide, doomed.

“What if they sent you to the military school up the road?” she asked. “Maybe I could visit you. They wouldn’t have to know.” I shook my head. “When they decided to send me away, they meant away. Mississippi. Tennessee. Virginia. Away.” Leave it to Lori to find the bright side. She cracked a smile. “Maybe you’ll like it. Will they let you shoot off cannons and machine guns?”

“No, I’m pretty sure you learn military traditions like wearing uniforms and standing at attention for hours, with all the good stuff like explosions taken out. My parents want it to be punishment because they think I’m worthless.”

Her smile faded. “They don’t think you’re worthless.”

“I don’t see why not. Sean will go to college in the fall. Cameron will go back. If I was away at school too, my parents would get their empty nest two years early. I’m sure they’ll be happy to get rid of me.”

She considered me, frowning hard. She looked like she was racking her brain for a response to this that would make me feel better, but the evidence against me was obvious. Finally she reached up beside my ear and touched my hair. “Will they shave your head?” I really didn’t care what I looked like, as evidenced by my beard. I definitely didn’t care about my hair—or, at least, I never would have admitted it.

But something about the way Lori touched it and looked at my hair rather than meeting my eyes made me care. A lot.

“My dad can see you,” I said.

She started to look in the direction of the warehouse, but she stopped herself with her head half turned and her chin pointed in the air. She dropped her hand.

The gas pump clicked off, and I slid the nozzle from the tank. Lori roared off across the lake on some errand, blonde ponytail streaming behind her.

I paced up and down the stairs again, but this time it wasn’t from a loss of anything else to occupy me. I was thinking.

I was thinking so hard, in fact, that when I wakeboarded with Lori and the guys that afternoon, I landed a perfect air raley and didn’t even notice. e guys told me I should be sent to military school more often, and then maybe I could have a professional wakeboarding career. eir little jabs didn’t touch me anymore. I was forming a plan.

After wakeboarding, I passed the office and heard Lori arguing with my mom about sending me to school. It wouldn’t work, and I didn’t let it faze me. I knew what I had to do.

The threat of Adam’s parents sending him to military school had lurked in the back of my mind for three weeks, like one of those bad backdrops in a school picture, a photo of a fake library. Even if your school picture turned out great for once, there was no getting around the fact that you were grinning your ass off in front of stacks of pretend books. No matter how high the ups had been for Adam and me in the past few weeks, this threat dragged them down.

Now the threat was finally real. And I refused to accept it.

I couldn’t tell whether Adam accepted it or not. Rather than being angry about it and throwing stuff, which is what I’d expected from him, he seemed confused, like he didn’t know what to make of it. Late in the afternoon he even executed a series of perfect tricks during his turn wakeboarding. e boys and I looked at one another, astounded. This was not like Adam at all. He wasn’t concentrating on new and exciting ways to fall down.

Was this a preview of what military school would do to him? Even if I never got together with Adam again, I had to save him from this. After I hung my life vest and wake-board in the warehouse, I knocked on the office door and went in to face his mother.

I slipped onto the stool behind her. She typed busily on her computer and didn’t turn around. She must know what I was there for.

I said, “I broke the rules too, you know. It takes two to tango, or to spend two hours in a tree house together. Wooooo.” I wiggled my fingers as if to scare her with my horrible infraction. Since she still hadn’t looked around at me, the drama was reduced somewhat.

Frustrated, I said, “Why is he in all the trouble and I’m not in trouble at all? Instead of him going to military school, we could each take half the punishment. We could set up a bivouac for you on the front lawn. We both have lots of experience playing army.”

“You’re not in trouble, Lori, because nobody believes you would have snuck out last night if Adam hadn’t convinced you.” She never stopped typing as she said this to her computer screen. “Adam, on the other hand, has a long history of going out of his way to do the opposite of what we say. e fact that we’re sending him to school doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“It has everything to do with me!” I exclaimed.

“It did at first,” she acknowledged, “but now it doesn’t. Adam’s father and I have given him an order that he refuses to obey. And if he can’t obey it because of ADHD, yet he refuses to take his medicine, then he needs to learn another way to get along in the world. His father and I have tried. We can’t help him anymore.”

e office door screeched open. Adam filled the doorway. “ADHD is overdiagnosed and overmedicated,” he said in a professorial tone. “Studies show that one in three teenagers diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed stimulants doesn’t actually need treatment.” He slammed the door and was gone as quickly as he’d appeared.

“You are not that one of the three,” his mom hollered after him.

After her voice had stopped ringing in my ears, I said, “I don’t know. You think you can outsmart him, and then he comes up with something like that out of the blue.

You realize he reads the newspaper and he’s not as out of it as he acts.”

“Oh yeah?” Mrs. Vader asked. “Name one thing Adam has done this summer that displayed any forethought.”

“He left roses all over the marina for me. You helped him do that.”

“Granted, but he did that to apologize to you because he’d flown off the handle the night before. Name one more.” I opened my mouth to tell her about the sleeping bag, the pillows, the candle, and the Oreos in the tree house. I decided that evidence of advance planning for disobedience would not help his case.

Instead I said, “I think some of his problem is ADHD. I’ve known him forever, and he’s always been that way, so it’s hard to imagine what he’d be like otherwise. But some of his problem is Sean and Cameron egging him on. I know this sounds crazy, but I have seen Adam exercise extraordinary restraint in the face of incredible taunting.

The first year I knew y’all, I thought his name was ADD.”

Mrs. Vader hit the space bar over and over, so hard that I thought it would fly off. “Sean is not supposed to call Adam that.”

“I am aware of that. Sean does it anyway.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this some time in the past umpteen years?” She kept her voice low, but I could tell she was fed up with me.

“If you tattled about anything, you got kicked out of the club,” I explained. “I don’t want to be a member of the club anymore.”

“Well.” She clicked the mouse to close the document she was working on, then opened another and resumed typing. “We think this is what’s best for Adam in the long run. You might as well get on board.”

I sat there for a few more minutes, listening to her fingers tap on the keyboard. Since I’d come in, she hadn’t once stopped typing or turned around to look at me. is told me she was upset. Normally she would have given me her outraged face a time or two during this conversation.

She was upset about sending him away. She was sending him away anyway.

And it was all my fault.

I wanted to stay and argue with her. I would have if I’d thought it would have done any good. But I was all out of vague arguments, and I was afraid if I got further into the specifics of Adam and me, he’d get sent to school faster, like he’d said.

I spun around on my stool and stalked out of the office, hell-bent on showing my dad that Adam wasn’t so awful, once and for all. Mrs. Vader didn’t think I was capable of disobedience on my own, did she? I was a good little girl without a mind of my own who only got in trouble if a boy led her astray? I would show them all and save Adam from military school at the same time.