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My mother’s eyes widen. For a single, fleeting moment, she looks frantic and trapped. “She...doesn’t get to attend the covenant school.” Something about it rings hollow...Faith is a million times happier in her third-grade class than I remember being in mine, and my mother knows it. “She needs more from me in order to stay true to our values.”

Does she actually believe this? Does she not see the way I’m struggling to remain true to those values as well? She can’t possibly think the temptations are greater at age eight than they are at eighteen.

“Except you were like this with her long before we ever arrived here,” I counter.

“I did not raise you to behave like this,” she replies. “I’d like you to go to your room and think about what you’ve said.”

I almost laugh. She thinks being sent to my room is a punishment? Her whole life is a punishment. I’m more than happy to be sent away from it.

I return to my room and pick up Outlander once more.

10

My breath holds as I walk into English on Monday.

I refuse to act ashamed. He could never tell anyone that I liked it without admitting that he did it, and he can’t possibly know what I did in my room, even if it feels as if he must.

Kappy plops in the seat beside mine and starts chattering about a reality dating show I’d never be allowed to watch. I nod as she speaks, but my sole focus is the door Ford will push open any minute now. I’m still trying to put it all together: why I liked what he did and why I find him so fascinating, why he did it at all when he was so clearly horrified only a moment later. I have no experience, and I haven’t even seen many movies that depict sexual relationships...but I know I’ve never seen anything where a guy felt a girl up like that and did nothing else. There’s usually a kiss or something.

He walks in late, with a note for the teacher. His eyes are on me, surprised but not angry. It’s as if he’s looking straight through my skin.

I’m barely listening as Mrs. Onorato once again discusses college essays. We spend the last half of class writing about “an experience that changed me” and if I could be completely honest, I’d say it was coming here. We’ve only been in Penhallow for four weeks, but I sense a shift inside me, probably a bad shift, that I don’t think is going away.

I will leave here and go on to Bolivia and come back engaged, probably to someone who isn’t Sam, someone I never looked at twice before. I’ll raise children instead of using my degree, if I even get one, and spend Saturdays scrubbing baseboards while my husband relaxes, but I will never stop wondering if I missed out on something by doing it.

When class ends, Ford follows me out of the room and catches me at my locker.

“You didn’t tell anyone,” he says.

I stare into my locker. “No.”

A muscle feathers in his jaw. “Why not?”

If this were an after-school special, I’d look weak. This would be the early part, where the abused girl doesn’t stand up for herself and eventually winds up telling the entire school—via the school paper or some school assembly—about her assault.

I shoot him a quick glance. “If I’d told, you’d get kicked out.” I push my books into my locker with too much force. “And it might hurt your college prospects.”

He raises a brow. “You care about my college prospects?”

“No,” I tell him with a sigh, “but you do. I’m not going to ruin your life over something that didn’t...that wasn’t the hugest deal at the end of the day. And the look on your face made me think you regretted it. Like it wasn’t something you do to girls all the time.”

He exhales and his shoulders sag. “It isn’t. I would never...I don’t...I’m sorry. I’m really sorry I did it.”

I turn to face him, brave for the first time during this conversation. “Why did you?” I ask. “I just...don’t understand.”

There’s a flash of anger in his eyes before he looks away. “I don’t know,” he finally says, returning to meet my gaze. “But I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

“If you’re really sorry, maybe you can tell your friends to stop messing with me all the time.”

“None of those people are my friends,” he says. “Why the fuck do you persist in thinking I’m masterminding this somehow?”

I laugh, but I’d like to cry. Even now, after I saved his hide, he’s still not going to make it stop. “You tried to get my father fired. You vandalized my house, and you probably set the fire too. You also told me that I was going to regret moving here and now these people who want to impress you are messing with my locker and proclaiming justice for your sister and throwing things at me as I walk home. I know I seem naive, but I’m not stupid, Ford.”

His mouth presses into a tight, unforgiving line. “You know so much less than you think you do,” he says as he walks away.

Then tell me. Answer the damn question. Why would you do such a strange thing, then apologize for it?

In journalism, the tension between us remains, but it’s a different sort of tension. I can’t forget, no matter how much I try, that this man cupped my breast. I stare at my notebook through class, but my cheeks heat as I imagine his scrutiny. And almost every time I look up, I discover I wasn’t imagining anything. He’s watching me the way he might a spider hanging over his head, as if I might land at any moment. As if I’m dangerous. I leave class disappointed, wishing...I don’t know what it is I wished. But I know it’s not something I should have wanted in the first place.