His chair suddenly tipped backward hard.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Just chew.
“Hey, Jailbait. Heard you had some excitement on your street this morning.”
He chewed.
“My mom was walking Duchess, saw the whole thing.” Kolby’s voice came from directly above and behind him, close enough that Logan could smell the cafeteria’s pizza grease on his breath. “Your dad and Greta Dougherty. On the front porch. All over each other.”
Logan set the sandwich down. His hand was steady. He was proud of that.
“Your mom’s not even cold yet, and your dad’s already?—”
Logan stood up. He did it fast enough that the chair legs screeched against the floor, and Kolby actually flinched, stepped back, and put his hands up halfway before he caught himself.The cafeteria didn’t go silent—they were in the corner, and the lunch noise was too loud for that—but the two minions behind Kolby went still.
Logan was taller than him. He hadn’t fully registered that before. He didn’t have to be afraid of Kolby, because Kolby was a short little ant that he could easily crush. He balled his fists as heat moved up from his stomach into his chest, the thing his mother used to call his father’s temper, the thing he’d spent years pretending he didn’t have.
He thought of the article he’d found about his Dad’s arrest the other night after their fight. Jason Miller. Head trauma. One punch and he fell wrong.
One punch.
Logan uncurled his fists and stepped around Kolby, left his tray on the table, left his backpack hooked over the chair back, and walked toward the cafeteria door.
“Where are you going, Jailbird?”
He kept walking.
He went past the cafeteria, past the administration office where the vice-principal’s door stood half-open, past the attendance desk where a woman in a yellow cardigan was on the phone with her back to the hall. Past the trophy case with the football team’s 2019 state championship photo. Past the front desk, where someone had propped an artificial plant against the wall and it had slowly died anyway despite being made of plastic. Through the double doors.
The cold hit him in the face like a hand.
Nobody came after him.
He stood on the front steps for three seconds, just breathing. The parking lot was half-empty at this hour. The flag on the pole snapped in the wind, a sharp, rhythmic crack. He had his phone. He had his hoodie. He had forty-three dollars in his wallet. That had to be enough to get home.
He went down the steps and turned east, away from Maple Street.
The gas station on the east end of Solace sat where Highway 93 bent and straightened out before it ran north toward Missoula. A Conoco with two pump islands and a glass-front convenience store that smelled like hot dogs and floor wax. Logan stood between the pumps with his hands in his hoodie pocket and watched the cars cycle through.
He knew the rough geography. 93 north to Missoula. Then I-90 east. East was Denver. East was his street, his apartment, the woman down the hall who had spare keys to their unit and who’d left a casserole outside their door every Sunday since Amber got her shift extended at the hospital, which was four years ago now and the woman had never stopped. East was his room with the glow-in-the-dark star stickers he’d put on the ceiling at age nine and never taken down because he liked the way they looked even when he was too old to say so.
He had forty-three dollars and no plan and the specific clarity of someone who has decided that clarity is overrated.
A man in a Carhartt jacket came out of the convenience store with a coffee, walked to a beat-up F-150, and started filling the tank. He was maybe forty, broad through the shoulders, face weathered in the way that Montana seemed to require of people who’d lived here long enough. He looked at Logan the way strangers looked at a sixteen-year-old standing alone by a gas pump at one in the afternoon on a Tuesday — not alarmed, but noting it.
Logan looked back.
The man looked away.
The pump clicked off. He topped it off, the way you do when it matters, hung the nozzle, got in the truck, and left.
Logan stood there another five minutes. Two more cars came and went. A woman in a minivan with a toddler in the back. A guy who filled up without getting out of the vehicle, one of those gas-and-go people, in and gone in under two minutes.
He could feel exactly how it would go — walking up to someone, the words he’d have to say, the explanation he’d have to give, the face the person would make when they looked at him. A kid alone on a Tuesday afternoon, no bags, no adult. They’d either say no or they’d say something worse: let me call someone for you, is everything okay, do you need?—
He couldn’t do it. He’d never been able to do it. His whole life had been about not needing anything from strangers, and he was not going to break that record at a Conoco in Solace, Montana.
He left the gas station and started walking.
