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The girl smiles at me, her round face dimpling. “I’m Kappy, by the way. I’m in your English class.”

I only recognize her now that she’s put it together. I smile weakly. “Sorry. I’ve been busy dodging paper balls thrown at my head.”

She waves her hand. “That’s JJ. He’s a jackass. Weirdly smart, but a jackass.”

“I kind of figured it was his friend.”

Her brow furrows. “Who? Ford? Nah. That’s not really his style.”

No, his style is just to burn down someone’s house instead.

“Hey, Prairie Girl!” shouts one of the Kendalls. “How stinky is your vadge that you need so many panty liners? Maybe we’ll call you Stinky Box instead.”

I slam my locker door and head down the hall as someone else shouts, “See you tomorrow, Stinky Box!”

When God closes a door, he opens a window, my parents like to say.

So far, outside the window, I’m only finding dark clouds.

6

Idream about Mary Joyce. She’s throwing books through my window, one after another, while I beg her to stop. There are too many—I can’t hide them, and the weight begins to crush me.

I wake, gasping, certain that hundreds of pounds of books have me pinned to the floor of my old room. I don’t even know where I am for a moment. And then I remember—we are in Penhallow. And Mary Joyce has been gone for many, many years.

The last time she actually spoke to me was the night she ran away. I was nine and she was fifteen, different from my mom—her aunt—but just as pretty, her hair the palest, most ethereal blonde. She was an expert at shimmying down the side of the house from her window by then. I’d never told on her, but I was beginning to worry that I should: she no longer spoke to me, and sometimes—on the nights she didn’t sneak out—I could hear her crying in her room. That’s how close her bedroom was to mine.

I didn’t ask the questions I should have on the night she ran away. I was too thrilled that she was talking to me at all. She usually smiled when we spoke from her room to mine, but on that night she didn’t smile once. I guess if I had to name the look on her face, I’d call it resolute, as if she was about to undertake a journey or fight a great foe. But maybe I’m imagining that now, knowing that she was, in fact, about to undertake a great journey.

“I have something for you,” she said. “I have a few things. For when you’re older. Hide them, for now.”

She tossed a book, and I caught it—Beloved was the first one, the only one I ended up reading. I don’t remember the others.

“You’re not mad at me anymore?” I’d asked.

Her eyes were damp with tears. “Grace, I was never mad at you. There was just a lot going on. You’ll understand it when you’re older.”

I hate when grown-ups say that, and the thing I loved about Mary Joyce is that she never treated me like a little kid.

“Go back to bed,” she said, and I began to lower the sash, disappointed. I’d wanted her to rattle on at length about what had happened in her day and her week. I’d wanted to hear the gossip about her friends and the boys she liked and which one she planned to marry when she went to Mission.

“Hey Grace,” she called at the last moment. “Don’t let them tell you who you have to be in the world, okay?”

I had no clue why she’d said that. I still don’t. They were her final words to me, though I didn’t realize it at the time.

I’ve spent the past nine years wishing I’d asked. Wishing I’d told on her or begged her not to leave.

It could have all been avoided if she’d been convinced to stay.

My second week doesn’t vary much from the first. The Kendalls laugh and call me names, JJ throws stuff at my head, and Ford offers quiet and well-thought-out responses to every question he’s asked in class. He’s our century’s Jekyll and Hyde: polite honors student with deep thoughts one moment, cocky juvenile delinquent the next.

But at least Kappy is now sitting beside me.

Each morning after class, she walks with me to my locker, telling me everything that’s been said on Hallpass now that I’ve admitted to her that I’m not allowed to download it. When JJ throws something at my head, she tells him to suck her dick. The phrase is so vulgar and shocking I can only stare at her in disbelief as she utters it.

The Kendalls have continued to call me Prairie Girl and Stinky Box, but they’re nearly as awful to Kappy as they are to me, which makes it easier to bear—they call her a fat bitch when she stands beside me in the hall and imply that the two of us are lovers. Ford, I’ve noticed, does not participate. When he passes us in the hall, he ignores me entirely and gives Kappy the briefest chin nod. “Hey, Kap,” he says. It’s not effusive, but Ford never is. A quiet quarter-smile is his version of uncontrolled laughter. But a mafia don would be just as silent—it doesn’t mean he’s not controlling all the mayhem with a tip of his chin or a raise of his brows. It might even be a sign that he is. Either way, he could stop it in a heartbeat if he chose to, so as far as I’m concerned, he’s still responsible no matter how smart he sounds in class.

At the week’s end, Kappy introduces me to her friends, Zoe and Lauren. The three of them roll up their skirts like the Kendalls, but they are full of enthusiasm in a way that the girls at Bright Covenant never were and are impossible to dislike. They gush, telling me I look like a girl on this show they watch and she’s a literal goddess. They invite me to get coffee after school, which I’d never be allowed to do.