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She stopped letting me push her back. “I need you, Jessie—I can’t do this alone.”

The world paused around me. So often in life decisions you made had consequences you couldn’t see—what would’ve happened if you’d sat at that other lunch table in third grade? If you hadn’t missed the field trip with the bus crash?—but this one’s were clear.

“I’ll be out in a second,” I said, just as the door to my room opened.

“Jessie, didn’t you hear me? Where’s your damn charger?” my mother said, then saw Lacey throwing herself out the window into the backyard. Her eyes flicked straight to me.

“I’m so sorry, Momma,” I said, running for the open window and hurling myself straight through. I bellyflopped onto the dirt outside, feeling all the air leave my lungs in awhush.

“Jessica!” my mother yelled sharply from inside my room. “JESSICA!”

Lacey helped me up to standing.

“SohelpmeifyouleavenowJessiedon’tbothercomingback!” my mother howled.

“I love you but I have to go!” I panted as Lacey dragged me around the side of the house.

My mother stuck her head out the window to see us. “I’m telling your mother about this, Lacey!”

“Please don’t—she might try to kill herself again!” Lacey called back, and then we were running and out of shouting distance.

We threw ourselves in to Darius’s waiting car, Lacey in the front seat, me in the back. I lay there instead of getting on a seatbelt, still trying to catch my breath.

CHAPTER 55

“Sorry Jessie,” Lacey said. I lurched upright when I could breathe.

“It’ll be okay. I’ll figure something out.”

“You can crash at my place tonight,” she went on.

“Let’s just get through the next few hours whole. Then we can worry, okay?”

“K.”

“How was today?”

“Normal. But I got your message on ZB—and Darius and I coordinated everything. I even messaged Mason, God help me.”

“That was super brave of you,” I said, finally fastening myself in.

“Not as brave as that,” she said, pointing back toward Ventana.

“My mom—she caught us last night. And before that she ran into Liam’s mother, who ratted us out about prom.” I leaned in between the front seats. “Sorry Darius, if she doesn’t like you now, it’s not racist, it’s just poorly aimed maternal instinct.”

He glanced over at me. “We’ll worry about that in a few hours too.”

The roads we drove on got more rural as time went by. Street lamps disappeared and headlights ruled, the moon was just a sliver when you could see it, mostly covered by scudding clouds.

“Are all the girls coming? Did you tell them about Mason?”

“No, I just said that we’d be formulating a plan. We meet the girls at eight, and then him at nine. That way, anyone who doesn’t want to talk to him can leave.”

“Okay.”

At a tree with a smiley-face of reflective lights embedded in its trunk we took a right, then the road wound left, paralleling the highway for a time before diving deeper into the woods and dead ending in a clearing with a shack.

“Are you sure your uncle’s not a serial killer?”