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‘Brooke,’ I murmured again, but my fingers were already caressing the soft cotton fabric. No one had ever done something like this for me – something nice, just to be nice – and any more protests I had faded away.

4

Lady Sings the Blues– Billie Holiday

After a crazy first two days on the road, we decided to spend the third day putting serious distance between us and Seattle. The weather was starting to clear up as we headed into Idaho, with more blue skies and fewer clouds, and that seemed to put Brooke in a good mood.

We were on a stretch of two-lane highway that was full of truckers and tankers and not that many cars like Brooke’s. We went for miles at a time without seeing anything, then a cluster of billboards would appear on the horizon, accompanied by a cracked parking lot and another strip mall. Then they’d disappear in the rearview mirror, and we were back to looking at wide-open nothing.

I was worried that the Mustang would get us noticed far more than if we were traveling in some boring beige car, though I knew there was less than no chance of Brooke giving it up, so I didn’t say anything to her. Not when we were getting along so well.

We’d stopped the night before in another nondescript motel a few miles from the state border and eaten Chinese food on the bed while watching reruns of30 Rock. Brooke had let me choose the TV channel, and comedy was better for me at the moment than dramas – there was less chance of seeing a body covered in blood and having another intense flashback.

I didn’t want to wreck this fun, easy thing we had going. Not with my baggage, or my crush on her, or by asking for too much. She’d let me pick the music again, though, and I’d gone for wailing jazz this time, just because it was so different from everything we’d been listening to so far.

‘What’s your real name, Mouse?’ Brooke asked.

I had my feet on the dash of the Mustang, something Brooke only let me do when I took my shoes off. I swallowed the mouthful of Twizzler I’d been gnawing on before answering her.

‘Jessie. Jessie Violet Swift.’

‘That’s pretty. Short for Jessica?’

‘No. Just Jessie.’

‘Why do people call you Mouse, then?’

‘Oh, God, that’s a long story.’

‘It’s a long road,’ she said without apology.

‘Maybe it’s not so long. I guess it started in ninth grade.’ Had I really been dragging around the nickname for three years? Holy crap. ‘I was the new kid, and I was short and pale and weird.’

I also had light-brown hair and pale-gray eyes, and I jumped whenever anyone spoke to me. I was the new kidin my first year of Catholic high school, and I had to navigate wearing a uniform and rules that definitely weren’t part of my last non-religious school. On top of that, I was a scholarship kid, which made me super insecure. I felt like everyone would be able to tell just by looking at me that I didn’t really belong.

‘You’re not pale and weird anymore.’

She had to be joking, right? I wasdefinitelystill both of those things.

‘You’re still short, though,’ she said, offering me a tiny smirk.

I tucked that smile away, sure I’d want to think about it more later.

‘You’re not wrong,’ I said. ‘So, yeah, the kids called me “the mouse”, and I guess it stuck.’

‘Since you started at St. Catherine’s?’

‘Yup.’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘Yeah,’ I said honestly. ‘That time in my life wasn’t the best.’

Almost as soon as we’d settled in Seattle, my mom had a new boyfriend – not the Creep, a guy called Simon – and she immediately became obsessed with him, like she did with every new boyfriend. Simon was okay. He could be weird sometimes, and he was fanatical about hockey, so I learned quickly to be somewhere else if he wanted to watch it at our house.

Simon wasn’t around for long. When he broke up with my mom, she would swing between crying for hours and afurious rage, and I never knew what mood she’d be in when I got home from school. That was my strongest memory of starting high school. My mom getting dumped.

‘Didn’t your parents do anything about it?’ Brooke asked.