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Whatthehellwhathehellwhatthehell—Sarah and Lacey knew that my mom could see my phone—but what if this was the time they forgot?What. The. Hellllllll?—

“Huh.” She licked her front teeth. “Lacey’s in the hospital. Wants you to come visit.”

“What?” I stood up from the couch so fast. “What’s wrong?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Mom—Mom—you have to let me see her—” I was a second away from dancing like a toddler who needed potty.

“I’ve got to go to work. Don’t worry, I’ll call her mom and see what’s going on.”

“But why can’t I just go? Barbara’s picking you up?—”

“Because you stole my car this morning.”

“Stealing implies I didn’t bring it back!”

My mother sighed a sigh like a freight train. “Jessica, you need to learn that everything in life you do has consequences.” She dropped her keys into her purse and outside our trailer a car honked. “Barbara’s here. We’ll go tomorrow, I promise. Get to bed early, girls,” she said, and waved like a prom queen on her way out the door.

I stared at the closed door once she was gone. There was a chance my mother was lying to me, but she’d seemed as surprised as I was at the news. My mother was many things, most of them awful, but a good actor she was not.

“What’s wrong with Lacey?” Allie asked, coming over to stand at my side.

“I don’t know.” But I knew where to start finding out.

CHAPTER 4

Iwaited a good thirty minutes, long enough for my mom to get to work and if she’d forgotten anything to have decided to go without. Then I reached under her bed and pulled outourlaptop.

It wasours, no matter that she treated it like it only belonged to her.Ourdad had gotten it foruslast Christmas, but she hoarded it and wouldn’t let us see it unless we had school projects to work on, and then only while she was awake to watch us.

Allie danced up to me, sitting on Mom’s bed, with an, “Ummmmmmmmm.”

“Look, are you telling, or not?”

My little sister weighed her options. She could kick me while I was down, or trade for bigger things. “Can I watch pony videos when you’re finished?”

“Deal. Give me thirty-minutes, okay?” She nodded, and lingered. I gave her a look. “Shoo,” I said.

She stomped out to the living room and then called back, “I’m timing you!”

“I know!” I shouted back at her, tapping my fingers on the keyboard as I waited for the computer to boot.

It wasn’t top of the line, it was top-of-whatever-Dad’s-new-wife-would-allow-him-to-buy-us two years ago. I’d only met her twice, but twice was enough to imagine the face she’d made seeing his credit card bill that January. She wanted him to spend all his time and money on her kids—on their kids, now that they shared one. Whereas for us? Well. I supposed parenting was a skill like any other that you could figure out how to get good at. But no kid slept well at night knowing that they were just the practice ones.

The generic sunrise desktop my mother installed came up, and along with it all the tabs and folders and files. I pulled up a web browser and knew exactly where I was heading next.

ZoomBoom.

It’d started as some silly photo-sharing app and had slowly become something more—I had it installed on my phone, but I could log into it here under duress.

I typed in my info—I was MizMarmelade, named after the orange cat we’d had while growing up—and zany colors greeted me, along with the obnoxious ticking sound of photos expiring. Everything on the site was only there for one day and it wanted you to know that. If you weren’t constantly on it, you were guaranteed to be missing something. I turned the volume off so I wouldn’t have to hear it countdown.

Since the party was last night, I only had a few hours left to see what there was to see—and that was limited by the number of connections I had at the party. Personally? Zero. But via Sarah’s newfound popularity, I could see some of her boom-buddies—the name was intentionally horrible, I was sure.

Even with only a day’s worth of time, there were at least a hundred crap photos, between her friends and mine. Dinners, shoes, dogs, cars, clouds, with witty comments and without. I swiped through them all until I finally got to Liam’s.

Apart from the generic herds of older classmates posing with red cups that could’ve honestly held soda, officer-sir, I knew I was in the right place when I found his couch—the one I hoped we would still someday make out on.