Page 31 of All the way home

“How was the party?” Kieran asked.

Never one to waste time, Rena cut to the chase. “Do you know Lucas Hill?”

“He’s the soccer kid, right?” When she nodded, he asked, “Did he talk to you?”

“Yes.” One hand to her cheek, Rena nodded.

“Talked to you, like . . . talked to you? Or regularly?”

Alarmed, Rena sank onto his bed. “There’s a difference?”

“Did he talk to you like he liked you?”

“He didn’t talk like he disliked me.”

Squinting at her, Kieran visibly made several swift calculations.

“I liked him,” Rena confessed. “I thought he was very nice.”

He sighed. “Be careful.”

His lack of enthusiasm stung.

“Careful, like . . . code-orange careful?”

Code orange was their indicator for an incoming deadly-serious emergency, like when Dad was in a terrible mood and wanted help with yard work, or when Rena was about to have one of her episodes where she couldn’t breathe or speak and thought she might be dying.

Kieran shook his head.

“I just mean be cautious.”

Cautiously, she asked, “Why?”

“People take advantage of you,” he reminded her. “Remember grade five? When all those girls made fun of you for not realizing you didn’t have to do whatever they told you?”

“That was ages ago,” Rena said stiffly. “Harper’s different now.”

“Okay, this is kind of proving my point.”

Helpless disappointment flooded through her. Dimly, she asked, “How?”

Kieran thought about that for a long time, running a hand over his short-cropped hair. Then he said, “Everyone knows Lucas and Harper are a thing. Or were.”

“Were,” Rena confirmed. “Harper likes Derek now.”

Rolling his eyes, Kieran let out a blustery sigh. “Well, better Lucas than Derek.”

Then he gave her a little smile of encouragement. “So long as you keep your wits about you.”

“My wits are always about me,” she reminded him, which made him laugh, and then she felt better.

Once upon a time, Kieran had been the one who worried about her.

Bitterly, Rena misses that certainty.

The sour, dull silence at the gate stretches out, one minute carried into the next.

Watching the teenagers across the aisle squabble over a bright-red Switch, Lucas’s shoulders slump.