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high school you were so nice to everyone.” Maybe she shouldn’t be

bringing up the past, but when it sat so heavily on her, what else could she

do? It was the only thing they had in common, the one thing that would

forever stand in both of their minds, wherever they went, no matter how far

forward they ended up going.

Arabella wanted to apologize again. Properly. She realized it would be

better if she had written down a list of all the things she could think of to

apologize for. A blanket apology seemed trite and insincere.

“Can I ask you something?” June said. She shifted against the tree and

the bark rasped against her clothing. The sound was soft in the night.

“Okay. Sure.”

“You’ll answer honestly?”

“Yes.”

June sighed. “That stuff about your parents. It’s really true? You didn’t

just give us a fake address and go camp out at a friend’s house for us to pick

you up at?”

Pride was a hard thing to swallow, but Arabella had enough practice at it

over the years that she didn’t have much difficulty in getting down the sour

taste of her own ego now, with all its bruises and mars and scuffs. “I think

that if I was going to lie about something, I’d probably lie about something

much better than that. I’d want to say it didn’t happen and that we were all

doing fine. And then I’d go camp out at someone’s much nicer, more

expensive house and say it was mine.”

June gave an unexpected laugh. “Yeah. True, you probably would. Well,

now that I know that you weren’t lying about any of that, and that’s a rough

one, I’m really sorry about what happened. Can I ask you what I really

wanted to ask you?”

Closing her eyes, Arabella leaned harder into the tree, pressing her

tailbone in until it ached. Foreboding soured her stomach. She knew she

owed it to June to be honest, no matter how bad the coming question might