Page 3

She doesn’t seem relieved, and I’m not surprised. It doesn’t make much of a dent when my mother says it to me either.

We reach the table, where flies hover over food that didn’t seem all that appealing to start—hot dogs and burgers and salads of various sorts, wilting in the sun. Mrs. V, the school board’s secretary, and the only person from Penhallow who’s stopped by the house, comes up beside me.

“Can’t decide what to eat?” she asks. I hear pity in her voice. It’s painfully obvious that we don’t fit in.

“I’m not all that hungry,” I reply. Hope doesn’t answer, too busy watching the guys ahead of us throw a football around, knocking into each other, pushing one another to the ground. I can’t blame her for staring—our only contact with boys back home was at church and at community events, where they wore button-down shirts and full-length pants. They didn’t throw a ball around and laugh and wrestle. They restrained themselves.

These boys clearly don’t.

From behind us comes another burst of laughter, the spiteful kind. And why? Yes, my father had to ask Leila, Ford’s twin, to leave—she had problems the school wasn’t equipped to deal with, and the fact that she’s still in inpatient treatment makes that fact indisputable.

Why take that out on me and my sisters? I sometimes felt stifled in New Hope, but I long for it now. People didn’t act like this there. They wouldn’t have dared.

Mrs. V pats me on the shoulder. “Ignore them,” she says. “We needed this change and your father is doing God’s work here. Some people are slower to come around than others.”

My father would still have accepted the job if he’d known how hard it would be—he’d just decide the obstacles were yet another of God’s tests. Personally, I feel like life is hard enough without inviting extra adversity, but I’m not good like my parents. Not yet.

I’ve just nudged Hope to move along when my gaze catches on a boy at the table’s end, a boy who is already looking at me—and the whole world comes to a stop.

I no longer hear the music or the laughter. I no longer notice the snickers, the snide glances. These things still exist—just like the sun and the breeze and the ground beneath me—but they’ve been rendered meaningless.

His sandy brown hair is lit by the sun, and his bone structure is as finely wrought as sculpture. He looks like a handsome young cop on a TV show—he even has a cleft in his chin. But it’s the way he looks at me now—like a lion who’s just gotten a whiff of gazelle in the air—that makes my breath come short, that makes whatever Hope is currently saying to me as empty as wind in my ear.

I’ve been looked at that way before, mostly by the gawky boys in our community, or the men we used to pass in the neighboring town. But this is the first time that I’m not sure I mind it. It’s terrifying in the way of a summer storm, the air heavy with both danger and promise. As thrilling as it is unnerving.

He’s still staring as the guy beside him whispers in his ear. That’s when his face changes. That sharp interest turns to anger and disappointment.

“Ford!” shouts one of the girls behind me. His eyes flicker toward her and my mouth falls open.

This can’t be Ford James. I’d pictured him as the bad guy in an after-school special—beady-eyed, a cigarette hanging from his lips, a gun in his waistband. Not this clean-cut, beautiful boy/man.

But how many Fords can there be here?

He grabs his shirt off a chair and leaves, just like that, with a single glance back at me from the gate. Inexplicably, I feel guilty that he’s left because of us.

The guilt ends, though, once I learn that he left to go burn down my house.

3

The day after the fire, the police come over and talk to my parents in the front room. I perch just outside the door to listen, as does Hope.

“You got very lucky,” says the first officer.

By the time we got home last night, the firemen had already put out the blaze. The shrubs in front took the brunt of it, and aside from a black stain on the white brick and the smell of smoke inside, I can’t even tell it happened. But it still doesn’t seem like it’s their place to tell us we got lucky.

“I assume you spoke to Mr. James already,” my father says.

“He has an alibi,” one of the officers replies. “He says he was with friends.”

“He clearly tried to burn down our home,” my mother rasps. “You found matches from the restaurant he works at on the scene and after all the damage he did a few weeks ago, who else could it be?” Hope and I exchange a glance—it’s incredibly rare for our mother to interject, or to sound so desperate.

But she’s right—no one but the James family has any reason to hate us.

“Aside from the previous incident,” the cop replies, “he’s always been a good kid. And pursuing this could really impact his draft prospects.”

As if my parents, his victims, should care about that. Penhallow was once a sleepy little Florida prep school with a reputation for placing kids in Ivies. Now they’ve got a football team making the news...I guess that matters more than arson around here.

I wait to hear my father put them in their place, to tell them that if half as many people went to church on Sunday as watched the Super Bowl, things like this wouldn’t happen. I’ve heard this sermon of his more than once.