“Oh great,” Z says sarcastically, “another year of everyone calling me a klepto and you a slut. Why am I not more excited?”
I shrug. It’s not like we didn’t earn our reputations. Well. I mean, I’ve only slept with three guys in total, but that might as well be a million to the slut-shaming rumor mill in a town as small as Selbyville. According to them, I’ve slept with the entire football team—how cliché. At least the rumors got inventive when they started saying that I’d fucked most of themarching band, too.
Anyway, none of this will matter soon. Z and I will leave and start over, and then we can be anyone we want to be. Completely new people, even.
But as I stare up at Z’s broken ceiling fan, I wonder. If I’m not who everyone says I am, who the hellamI, exactly? They say that being a teenager is a time of self-discovery—all that coming of age shit.
But I don’t feel like I’ll have any idea of who I might become until I get the hell away from here. Because if I don’t leave, I’m terrified I’ll get swallowed up by it just like everybody else in Grass Valley.
There’s a momentum to life, I’ve always thought, and if you don’t use the launch power while you still have some fight left in you, you never escape where you started out. Darlene told me about her dreams once, and they sounded an awful lot like mine. She wanted to make it to the city. To get out. But she just ended up at the bottom of a bottle, all of eight miles down the road from whereshegrew up in an even shittier trailer park. And she never left.
I frown over at Z. “Did you get anything to eat today?”
He shrugs and looks away.
“Heads up.” I open my purse, rummage around inside past my little sketchbook until my hand closes around what I’m looking for. I pull out the candy bar and toss it at Z’s chest.
He catches it mid-air, eyes widening. “Did you go by Smithy’s without me?” He immediately opens the chocolate bar and shoves half of it in his mouth. Smithy’s is the little family grocery down the road that we shoplift from sometimes, but usually only when it’s both of us—one to distract, the other to lift. Since I’ve got the tits, I’m usually the one doing the distracting.
“Careful, not too fast,” I say when Z just keeps inhaling the chocolate.
He rolls his eyes at me.
“I found some quarters on the ground and got it from the machine.”
Z’s eyes flick to me, chocolate smeared at the edges of his mouth as he gulps down the last of the chocolate. “You should have told me that was all you had and I woulda shared!”
“I wanted you to have it.” I reach forward and give his knee a quick squeeze. “I know Frank’s been a shit lately. Have you been staying hydrated? I read the other day that we’re supposed to be drinking like a gallon of water every day. I know we get shit for food, but water’s free at least.”
“No one takes care of me like you do, Harp.”
I’m a little startled by the tenderness in Z’s voice, and when I look up again, he’s staring at me.
Not with his usual sarcastic, gamer-boy-chaos stare. This one’s different. Intense. Serious.
I don’t like it when Z gets serious. Z isn’t serious. Z is jokes and rage-quits and the best friend who holds me at night when I climb in his window to escape this Todd and the one before him and the one before him—without ever asking questions because we don’t do words. We do survival.
We keep it casual even though we both know we’d fucking stab a bitch for each other.
Except in this little modern fairytale, the monsters are real, older, and bigger, and we’re both too scrawny to actually defend each other from anything that matters.
“Remember the day we met?” he asks.
“Uh, yeah, dork. Not like I’m gonna forget.” I laugh, glad he’s moving things to lighter territory. “I was hiding from one of Mom’s other Todds and ran into you being a delinquent in the woods, staring at that fat blunt like it was a brick of solid gold.”
“Man, Iscoredthat weed in a legit heist,” he says, and I can still hear the pride in his voice.
“You thought you were so cool.”
“Iwasso cool,” he corrects.
“Oh, right, my bad. Youwereso cool. You had a fat blunt and absolutely no way to smoke it.”
“But you had your dad’s Zippo,” he says, and his smile goes softer.
My throat tightens at the mention of Dad. I pull theZippo from my pocket out of habit—S.T.engraved in the silver—and open it. I roll the thumb wheel even though it’s been empty for as long as I can remember. The sound used to mean he was home.
Silas spent most of my childhood locked up in the slammer for one con or another, always promising he’d changed. Always lying.