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“If there’s anyone who could handle him, it’s you,” Sydney said before I closed my door.

“Why?” I asked her. I gave her an intent look, and she started to fumble for words.

“I just mean . . . I mean . . . with . . . what’s happened to you . . . you just know what to do better than any of us.”

“Not everyone and every situation is the same, Sydney. And I didn’t grow up around kids whose families were rich and famous.”

“I know. I just thought . . .” She looked at the other two for help.

It always bothered me that most of t

he girls in my class who knew what Kiera and her friends had done to me when I first came to this school treated it as a war wound or something similar. They practically had me wearing a Purple Heart. It was good for my ego to have them think I was so sophisticated, but the truth was, it didn’t make me all that much wiser when it came to relationships with boys. If anything, it made me more frightened, and maybe that was really why I was so hesitant about being involved with one boy all this time.

I realized that this was partly my fault. Instead of telling them that I didn’t know what was right or wrong for them to do when they came to me with their romantic problems, I offered suggestions. Sometimes I even tested some of the questions out with Kiera. Give the devil her due, I would think. Let’s see what she would tell them. And most of the time, I thought her advice was good and gave it, but now I was sorry I had gone so far with this. It was enough to be responsible for myself, much less everyone else’s teenage love life.

“It’s nothing to spend any time over,” I offered, but the three of them smiled at me as if I were the delusional one. “See you tomorrow,” I said, and closed the door.

“You better call me tonight,” Jessica called after me.

I waved at her and drove off, feeling strangely numb. It was as if I had left my body and was as light as air. I felt emotionally exhausted. The banter I had with Ryder was stressful at times but also exciting. I could see that he was sincere when he said he was interested in me. If he had been to five different schools, he surely had met many girls, girls who were like the girls here, excited about who he was and how good-looking he was. Some of the girls in this school might as well have waved a white flag at him, announcing their complete surrender to his every whim and wish, and there were many who were very attractive, some who I thought were far more beautiful than I was.

And yet he was drawn to me. Despite the Grand Canyon of differences between us, between the world into which he was born and the world into which I was, I felt we did share something very important. Both of us, despite how we might appear to others, were deeply wounded. I couldn’t help sensing that he was as lonely as I was at times, and as lost. We came to the same place over different roads of pain and suffering, but we were like two people who had found each other on a deserted island, undecided about whether we even should try to get off it and return to the world.

Was it good for me to be close to someone like Ryder or even just around him? Could I fall back into deep depressions? Should I tell him my story and, in doing so, revive so much pain? Maybe once he learned the terrible details, he would avoid me anyway. If he was looking to me to cheer him up or give him some sort of hope, he might be terribly disappointed.

And what about me? I knew what it was to be poor and almost invisible. When I was that way, living with my mother in the streets, I would often stare in awe at the well-dressed, beautiful women who drove expensive cars. I was sure some of them were celebrities. We lived in a place where celebrities were often sighted. How I envied them. And if I should see someone like that with a little girl beside her or holding her hand, how much I envied her or wanted to be just like her. Surely they lived in a perfect world.

But here was Ryder Garfield and his sister, Summer, children of the beautiful people, wealthy and famous, and yet both of them seemed unhappy and lost. What did I hope to learn from being with him? That there was no good place to be? That whether you had parents who were wealthy and successful or parents who were failures, you still ended up on that same island? What did matter, then?

Jordan had warned me about having anything to do with someone who was dark and unhappy. Was she right? Why was I both excited and frightened by the prospect of getting to know Ryder more and maybe becoming his lover? Was I just destined for this sad part of life? Would I always dwell in the darkness and feel tears on my cheeks in the rain?

I drove onto the March estate, conflicted. A part of me was saying that I shouldn’t even ask her for permission to invite him. Forget him. This can lead to no good. Tell him your foster mother didn’t approve or give you permission to invite him. It might be easier that way to discourage him, to stop this before it became too late.

But another part of me was clamoring for the challenge and the excitement. Just as he told me that I was the most interesting girl in the school, I saw him as the most interesting boy yet. So it’s a challenge. So what? If you retreat now, you’ll always retreat whenever a relationship shows the slightest difficulty. You’ll end up either like Kiera, always skeptical and selfish, or like Jordan, afraid and alone.

What would my mother tell me to do?

How I hated the silences I had heard and the silences I would hear.

How I longed for someone with not only wisdom to give me but true, real, and deep love.

Would I ever have that again?

6

Fighting

I was surprised to find Jordan sitting alone in my room. My first thought—and fear—was that she had been into my computer, suspecting that Kiera and I were keeping an e-mail correspondence that I didn’t share with her, and had read some of Kiera’s outrageous e-mails, but I could see that the computer was not turned on, and Jordan wasn’t very fond of computers. She had one, but she rarely used it. She told me, “I still like the feel and sound of someone’s voice. E-mails are just too impersonal. I can tell what someone is really thinking when I hear him or her speak, and that is especially true for my own daughter.”

She sat with her back to the door, looking out the window, and was in such deep thought that she didn’t seem to hear me enter.

“Jordan?”

She turned, and for a moment, I thought she had taken one of those pills I knew she took to calm herself. Sometimes they made her look pretty spaced out. I know her husband hated it when she did that. Right now, she looked as if she didn’t recognize me. I could see the confusion whirling about in her face.

“Jordan? Are you all right?” I said, approaching her.

“Oh,” she said, snapping out of her look of bewilderment. “Yes, yes, Sasha. I’m sorry. I was in deep thought for a moment and was thinking back to when I would sometimes wait here for Alena to return from school. Before she became very sick, she would bounce up the stairs and burst through that doorway, exploding with excitement about something she had done in school or something that was going to be done. No matter how bad my day was, it all became warm and sunny again. Just embracing her and kissing her did that for me.”