Page 15

Her expression remains neutral as we start toward the porch. What little bit of her eyes I can see stay fixed on me.

“My parents were shitty,” I tell her.

Something like disappointment flitters across her features. “So because you had bad parents you can’t be one?”

“Would you go to space without going to astronaut school?” I ask, eyebrows raised.

She looks back to Molly, not responding.

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“Where do you live?”

She scoffs. “I can’t tell a strange woman where I live.”

“Ah. But you can come to a strange woman’s house and interrogate the shit out of her?”

“You swear a lot.”

I lift my chin with a smirk. “It’s part of mystick up my buttappeal.”

For the first time, she almost laughs, and we stop at the porch, leaning against the edge. Molly whimpers from her spot by the door and the girl gives a firm, “Here,” prompting the dog to do a kind of army crawl across the porch until she’s beside us, earning a scratch behind her black-and-white ears.

I study the girl’s weird features again; she’d be pretty if she didn’t wear so much makeup.

“Your mom teach you to wear eyeliner like that?”

She shrugs.

“Your parents know you’re here?”

She holds up a wrist, barely pulling up the sleeve of her sweatshirt to show a chunky watch with a screen. “My dad makes me wear this so he can track me.”

I puff out a laugh at the annoyed expression on her face. I can’t relate: I’ve never been tracked in my life. “And your mom? She okay with you going to a triangle house hanging out with a dog by yourself?”

At this, she pushes herself off the porch, dusts her hands off, and looks at her combat boots. “She’s out of town. She’s a poet.”

“A traveling poet?”

She rolls her eyes. “So?”

I don’t care enough to push it. “Fine.”

“I usually come by in the afternoons and feed her if you want me to keep coming.”

I look at her ridiculous eyeliner and the dog who could be her twin sibling; I have no clue why she’d want to keep showing up here. “Fine.”

“Well, I just have something I need to get out of the shed, and then I can get going.”

She starts walking and I hold a palm out stopping her. “Is it in a little plastic bag?”

Guilt writes itself all over her face.Busted.

“Yeah, that’s not happening.”

She blows out a breath. “What are you going to do with it?”