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“Tenleigh Falyn,” Kyland called, letting me know that, in fact, he knew my name too.
I stopped and looked back at him questioningly.
He ran his hand through his hair, looking uncertain for a brief moment. “The reason I gave that sandwich to Joan Lytle…” He looked off into the distance as if he was choosing his words carefully. “Even for people like us, there’s always someone who’s hungrier. And hunger, well, it comes in different forms. I try not to forget that,” he finished quietly.
And then he stuffed his hands back into his pockets and walked away from me, headed back down the road. I leaned against the side of my trailer and watched him until he disappeared.
Kyland Barrett wasn’t at all what I had expected. And something about that both confused and thrilled me in a way I wasn’t sure I liked.
CHAPTER THREE
Kyland
“Hey, Mama,” I said, shutting the door to my house behind me and glancing into the living room where her chair sat in front of the TV.
My mama didn’t greet me back, but she never did. I was used to it now.
I went to my bedroom and opened the window as wide as it would go and stood looking out at the early evening sky, my hands braced on the windowsill as I drew in deep breaths of cold air. After a few minutes, I lay down on my bed right next to the window, bringing my arms up and resting my head on my hands behind me.
My mind went immediately to Tenleigh Falyn. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten her fired from her job. I grimaced. It was mostly her fault, so why did I feel like such a shit about it? It’d been her own stupid choice to cover for me. But thank God she had. If I’d been arrested for stealing…it would have been bad—very bad.
I hadn’t even known exactly why I stole that sandwich for Mrs. Lytle until I’d attempted to explain it to Tenleigh. And the only reason I’d offered an explanation at all was because I had nothing else to give Tenleigh as thanks for the sacrifice she’d made for me. I’d seen Joan Lytle sitting on the stairs of the old post office and something in the way she was hunched over, as if she was trying to curl up into herself, hit me square in the gut. I’d felt that way too. Only I, at least, had a roof over my head. I, at the very least, was only hungry the last week of every month, when the money ran out. Some force inside me had needed to let her know another person saw that she existed, whether she felt like she did or not. And so I’d swiped the sandwich.
A bad spur-of-the-moment choice that could have ruined everything for me. Still, I wasn’t exactly sorry for it, especially when I pictured the way Mrs. Lytle had gotten tears in her eyes when I handed her the food. My regret was for the fact that Tenleigh had been the one to pay the price for what I’d done.
Tenleigh.
My mind moved to the expression that had been on her face as I’d looked at her trailer. She’d felt shame, which was kind of ridiculous. My house was in shambles too. My life was in shambles. I was hardly one to judge her situation. But I hadn’t really been looking at her pitiful little trailer anyway. I’d been looking at the area around her trailer. It was clean and orderly, not a single piece of trash in sight—the same way I made sure to keep my own yard. Up and down this hill, the yards and properties were strewn with garbage—just another way the people in Dennville exhibited their defeat. No one on this mountain could afford a luxury like garbage pickup and most yards were buried under a pile of crap—a good metaphor for most lives in these parts. But each Monday, I gathered my garbage into two garbage bags and carried them down the hill and emptied them in the big dumpster out back of Rusty’s. Then I folded the garbage bags up and put them in my backpack. I made them last. When it was a choice between a couple cans of SpaghettiOs and a box of garbage bags, I was going to choose the food. I’d seen Tenleigh carrying a big box down the mountain now and again and wondered what was in it. She must have been doing the same thing. And I knew it was because she had pride. Which, for people like us, could be more a curse than a blessing.
I’d noticed Tenleigh before that too. In fact, I’d watched her in the few classes we had together. She always sat at the front of the classroom and I would position myself in the back so I had the perfect view. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I was amused by the way she reacted unconsciously when she was annoyed by someone who was talking to her, by scratching her bare leg and pursing her lips. I noticed the way she squinted up at the blackboard in serious concentration and nibbled at that pink lower lip, and I liked the way she sometimes stared out the window with that dreamy look on her face. I’d memorized her profile, the line of her neck. A hollow, ill feeling rose in my chest when I noticed the bottoms of her shoes, full of holes and practically falling off. I could see that she had used some kind of magic marker to color in the scuffs on the tops. I could picture her at home, coloring in those spots because she cared what people thought of her old, ruined shoes. It enraged me that she had to do that. Which was completely irrational. And which, of course, meant I had to stay far, far away from Tenleigh Falyn. I couldn’t afford to feel the things I felt just watching her. More to the point, I didn’t want to.
