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She threw her hands in the air, exasperated. “Fine.”

I ran around to Lacey’s side and hugged her. “What now?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure if that was the hard part, or the easy part.”

“Hard part.” It had to be. Because getting Danny thrown in jail wasn’t going to make us any friends, and tomorrow was a school day.

“We’ll see,” Lacey said. “See you tomorrow? Am I picking you up?”

“Yeah. And if my mother says I’m sick again, call the cops, I’m buried in the backyard.”

She laughed and for a moment it felt like we were young again, hanging out in the rain before all this, puddle-splashing age, when the only things we wanted in life were cartoons and candy.

“We made it,” I breathed, my desperate longing for the past squeezing my heart too tight.

“Yeah, we did,” she said, and hugged me, before racing into her trailer in the rain.

My mom insisted I take a hot shower, and then sat me down across from her and an amber glass of something on the rocks. “You get one chance to tell me everything. Go.”

So I did. Everything I thought she’d believe, and that she might hear about secondhand. About what’d happened to Lacey, and Lacey’s mom, and everything after that—the pictures, the lockers, the words on the bathroom stall. I left out how come I kept being in the center of it, made sure to make Darius sound awesome, and left out my electrical powers entirely. At the end of it she pondered me. She hadn’t taken a sip of her drink once.

“I still feel like you’re hiding things, Jessica.”

“I’m not, Mom,” I lied.

“That’s all right. Someday, you’ll tell me everything.”

I strongly doubted that. Everyone knew there was only so much truth that parents could take. She stood then, and picked up her drink. “Get to bed.”

“I’m going to school tomorrow, right?” Which was in, oh, six hours from now.

“Of course,” she said, like there’d been no question.

I walked down the hall to find Allie in my room. She was sprawled out across my entire bed, along with three of her stuffed animals. “I’m gone one night and you move in.” I chucked her stuffies to the floor to try to make room, and then shoved her across the bed until I could claim a sliver of the edge for myself. She looped an arm around me and pulled me close in her sleep, like I was the biggest stuffie of them all.

CHAPTER 57

Iwound up being glad Allie was there. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Danny, on the pitcher’s mound smug, Danny in Colton’s bedroom, Danny rising up behind us, bat in hand. What’d started off as Allie holding me switched to me clinging to her—and I wished I was sick, because any time I tried to figure out how school was going to go all I saw was dark, like the funnel of an oncoming twister.

So it was only right when my alarm went off that morning, I felt as rusty as a tin man. I debated showering even—did I want to look good today? Like I was pleased with notoriety? Or did I want to look haggard, like I’d been through a lot? I stared at myself in the mirror as I brushed my teeth, and finally realized it didn’t matter, people were going to believe what they wanted to, either way.

In some ways there was still no winning, even now.

I got into Lacey’s car and could instantly tell that she felt how I did. Neither of us knew what lay ahead, and what’d felt like a win last night was cold comfort this morning.

“You ready?” I asked.

“For what?” she asked back.

“I literally have no idea.”

“Me either. But it’s going to be all right.”

“Yeah, it is,” I lied.

We parked at the back of Redson’s lot and walked in side-by-side.

News of our arrival traveled fast. Conversations near us quieted as people who hadn’t seen us were elbowed into silence by those who had. I hadn’t logged onto ZB last night, I didn’t want to know what people were saying, but maybe that’d been foolish, maybe it’d have been safer to know what we were walking into.