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“I expect you to come out here and hang out with her—I don’t want her burning the place down, unsupervised.”

“I will, I will,” I promised, standing up.

My mom was gone by the time I reached the living room. I did my best to hang with Allie and trying to hide the fact that I was thinking about my phone. After fifteen-minutes of enforced sister-bonding, I went to the bathroom to clean my latest texts out.

Ten minutes later, after doing a sweep of everything worth seeing on ZB—which took a lot longer, manually—I pocketed my phone and opened the door, almost stumbling over Allie.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“Mom told me to watch you.”

“Oh God?—”

“Mom also said I could have soda and ice cream,” she said, with an entirely straight face. If Mom thought she had problems now, with me?—

“I’ll let you pick the channel tonight. But that’s it.”

“Fine,” Allie said emphatically, then went back to the TV.

I watched the minutes tick by the old-fashioned way, on the microwave. I didn’t want Allie telling mom that all I did all night was look at my phone, in case it’d remind her to go and take it away.

That didn’t stop me from thinking about it endlessly, though. What was gonna happen tonight? I’d tell Mason I had proof he’d cheated—he’d trade me the photos—and then Lacey and I would go straight to the police. Danny would get carted out of Redson High in handcuffs by noon tomorrow, if he bothered to show up—I could see it all now, ending just like one of thosetrue-crime shows my mother was so fond of. Everyone would play their part and do their job, and backstage we’d be all high-fives and smiles. A rainbow would burst out overhead. Kittens would spontaneously erupt from the earth in purring mounds. A unicorn would run by in the distance, pause, look at us majestically, and then gallop off, leaving a trail of undeniable happiness in its wake.

Or—

Or.

The microwave ticked over to nine-twenty-four.

“Okay! Bedtime!” I announced, trying to hide the quaver in my voice.

Allie twisted back to look at me, half her face in TV light, the other half in shadow. “One more show! Please? Please please please?”

One more’d push it to ten, and then what if she couldn’t go to sleep? But if I tucked her in too early, she’d wind herself up playing games with the stuffies on her bed. “Aren’t you tired at all?”

“Nope!”

Dammit to hell. “One more. But that’s it Allie, it’s a school night.”

“Fine,” she said, greatly put upon, and turned back to the TV.

She snuggled up against me, probably still a little traumatized from earlier today, and I managed to find a position with my arm slung out on the back of the couch where I could still casually scan everything happening on my phone. The show she picked had a laughtrack in the background and was easy to ignore until the end when I realized at long last my sister was asleep—against me.

“Oh shit,” I whispered.

If I woke her now, would she just go back to sleep? I only gave that even odds. She was too big to carry to her room, I’dhave to make her stand and shuffle her back. But if I were willing to leave her on the couch, maybe, just maybe—I pseudopoded away from her, one fractional inch at a time, replacing myself with couch pillows so that she was leaning against an equivalent amount of bulk. She brought one hand up to scratch her nose and then settled back. It’d taken ten too-long minutes, but I was free.

I left the TV on and the lights dimmed and ran back to my bedroom.

I was out on the street at ten-fourteen, knocking grass off my knees and pulling it out of my hair, after having made an only somewhat graceful exit through my window. Lacey’s car pulled up, she barely braked, and I hopped in—her face was flush by the dashboard lights and we didn’t say anything.

Mason’s dad’s shop was on the other side of town, where he profited from working not only on cars, but also on the forklifts that they used to move pallets at the chemical plant. It was more of a fortress than a store, with chain-link fences on all sides topped with razor-wire, but the gate was open, and only one truck was parked inside—in front of a mural of a bison. We parked three spaces down from it.

“We’re really doing this,” Lacey said. I didn’t know if it was a statement or a question, it could’ve gone either way.

“Yeah, we are,” I agreed, and got out of the car.

Mason got out of his truck, big and blue beneath a streetlamp, and walked over as Lacey got out. Watching him see Lacey there was like watching someone see a ghost.