Page 51

I go inside and drop my backpack in the cubbies just inside the door. Hope and Faith are doing their homework at the table. Faith smiles wide as I walk in. “I lost a tooth, Grace!”

I smile, but my heart squeezes tight. I could lose them all if I keep doing the wrong thing, the same way my cousin lost all of us.

“You’re going to be rich when the tooth fairy gets here,” I reply, walking around the table to give her a squeeze. “How much do you think you’ll get? Two hundred dollars? A thousand?”

“Maybe,” she says, giggling.

As I help my mother with dinner, the conversation turns to other things: Faith has a role in her class play, and there was a twelve-foot gator lurking under the neighbor’s car the other morning.

I begin to relax. No matter how badly I’ve messed up, I seem to have gotten away with it. And even if it was a mistake, I don’t care. I wouldn’t give up that kiss with Ford for all the other blessings in the world.

Dinner is nearly ready when my father arrives home.

“Hello there,” my mother begins. “I’ll have⁠—”

Her words fall away at the look on his face—his eyes narrowed; his mouth pinched with fury. And it’s entirely directed at me.

I react the way I did when those boys pulled me into the locker. I freeze, and then my entire body seems to go limp. The fear makes me want to fall to the floor like a rag doll, as if I’m boneless. Faith announces she’s lost a tooth again, and he’s so angry he doesn’t even acknowledge her.

“Grace,” he says, his voice tight. “I’d like to speak to you in my office.”

My stomach swims. I move down the hall, half worried I’ll pass out before I can even get inside.

The secretary must have seen something. Must have told him about it. Maybe the school has cameras monitoring us? How could I have been so stupid?

He slams his hand on the desk. “I told you to stay away from Ford James.”

My heart is pounding loud enough to be heard a block away, but the one thing I cannot do here is give him more information than he already has. I will never admit that I let Ford kiss me, not until the moment my father’s playing it back on film for us both. “I have two classes with him,” I whisper. “I can’t.”

He picks up a pen and begins clicking it hard, angrily, again and again.

“Mrs. V told me you were talking to him outside the kitchen this afternoon. And that you were friendly.”

“Mr. Wheeler asked us to go put the sandwiches we made in the fridge. We did, and then I went home and he returned the cart. That’s it.”

“And that required you to stand there chitchatting with someone who vandalized our house and spread rumors about us?”

My knees want to buckle in relief. He has no idea what happened, thank heaven. But I can’t believe he’s falling apart to this extent simply because we spoke.

“He didn’t even do it,” I argue. “It was the other kids on the football team, and he took the fall because he didn’t want to see everyone get punished.”

My father pinches the bridge of his nose. “And you believe that? If so, I’ve got some swampland I’d like to sell you. Ann said she thought you were surrounding yourself with bad influences, and clearly, she was right.”

The betrayal stings. Ann was my closest friend for most of my life and in just under four months...she’s become boring and disloyal. I guess she always was both of those things, but I never saw it until now.

“Three boys tried to pull me into a locker room last month, and he’s the one who stopped it.” My voice shakes. I don’t think I’ve ever truly challenged my father, and it’s not nearly as fun as Mary Joyce implied it would be. I’m mostly terrified, but it has to be said. “He’s not the monster you think he is.”

I expect my father to look shocked, to let this information pull him up short.

It doesn’t.

He’s simply furious, nostrils flaring, eyes narrowed. He’s not the man who raised me right now, the one who spent my entire life telling me to turn the other cheek, saying Judge not lest ye be judged. “He probably orchestrated the whole thing, and you’re falling for it like the ignorant child you are. If I tell you to stay away from someone, you stay away from him. End of discussion.”

Could Ford have orchestrated it? He did appear awfully fast after it started, and he never explained how he’d come to be there. But why would he bother? And why would he drive me home after it happened and kiss me today? Is it all a part of some mean game he’s playing—even if I haven’t watched a lot of movies about teens, I know how often that’s the plot: popular guy challenged to date the school’s dorkiest girl or take her to prom.

I don’t think he’s like that, though. He’s not a dumb jock, and he had as much to lose as I did today. More than I did. He needs to finish this year at Penhallow. I don’t need to finish high school for anything my father’s got planned for me.

“You’re always preaching about tolerance, and not judging a book by its cover, and giving people a second and third chance,” I say. “Why are the rules different only for him?”