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“Yeah, I know. I can do that now. And some other things.” I shrugged a little. “Darius has been helping me practice them.”

She stared at her phone mystified, and then she stared at me. “So—after what happened to me, you got…what? Superpowers?”

“Yeah,” I said softly. “They’ve been pretty useless so far,” I said, trying to downplay things.

“Except for when you saved me from that dog—and defibbed Lacey’s mom,” Darius spoke up, standing up for me at exactly the wrong time.

Lacey’s face crumpled, and I fell to my knees on the floor and crawled over to her quickly, hugging up as she bent down. I could almost see the question mark hanging over Darius’s head, but ignored him.

“Why?” she asked, into my hair.

I thought I knew what she was asking. Why me, why her, why all of this. “I don’t know, baby,” I said, holding her to me. “I just don’t know.”

“It’s not fair. I mean—I wouldn’t wish what happened—but?—”

“I know. I so completely know.” Sympathetic tears sprang to my eyes, and I rocked her. “It’s not fair. Not fair at all.”

I pushed up to sit in her chair beside her, her still wrapped in my arms, and saw Darius giving us both a worried look. “So—is your mom okay?”

Lacey nodded into my shoulder. “Yeah. Thanks to you.”

She cried a little more, safe with me, and then pulled back. The room we were in was stocked with Kleenex boxes and little water bottles, and she helped herself to one of each. And then she dimmed again, going back into her protective apathetic shell, jerking her chin at Darius. “Is he safe?”

He sat a little straighter as I vouched: “He’s kept my secret.”

“I can’t explain what happened if he doesn’t know. And if I tell him, and he says the wrong thing, I’m going to murder him,” she informed us both flatly.

“If you tell him, and he says the wrong thing, I’ll murder him for you.”

“You’d do that? For me?” she asked. Her voice was 99% sarcasm and 1% sincerity. I concentrated on that 1% and took her hands.

“Always.”

“Okay.” She nodded and turned to face him. “You know how everyone thinks I slept with Danny at Liam’s last weekend? After I cut work?”

He nodded slowly.

“Well I didn’t. He raped me.”

I could hear her teeth clench in her mouth after she’d said the words, and she was staring so intently at Darius that I thought he might burst into flames.

For his part, his brow furrowed and he looked at the ground. “Oh.”

“Oh?” she asked, challengingly.

“Yeah. Honestly, I was hoping you’d gotten a superpower too.”

I put my hand over my face, but Lacey—I watched her eyebrows crawl high up her forehead and made a laugh that turned into a bray. “I fucking wish,” she said.

That bridge crossed, I relaxed, ever so slightly. “So what happened with your mom yesterday?”

“You know my mom. Ever since,” and she waved her hands around in the air to indicate theincident, “she’s been moping around the house. Talking about how she made some mistake parenting me. Apparently I’m not actually a child, but I’m some sort of glass-creature she blew out of her vagina that she intended to give to my future husband, mint in box.”

I gave Darius a quick look and saw him biting his lips.

“It makes sense if you’ve ever met her,” I said, for his sake, then Lacey went on.

“Like, me going to that party without telling her was one thing, and getting raped was another—but when I told the cops I didn’t want them to press charges—and then that night you came over and we forgot to put the screen back in? I told her it was you, but she just assumed I had some boy over becauseof course I would, you know, just to show him the stitches, and suddenly she didn’t know ‘what to believe’.” Lacey wound up into a fair imitation of her mom.