Page 36

Yes, and riding in yours would be even worse. “I don’t think that would go over well with my parents.”

His jaw grinds. “I can drop you off a few blocks away.”

I close my eyes. I’m going to be late. I’m upset. My legs are so rubbery it’ll be a struggle to get home, and he seems like he’s being genuinely nice. He’s seemed it, honestly, since that afternoon in the hall. But Cora seemed nice too. “Is this some kind of trick?” I whisper.

“A trick?”

“Are you going to take me to the forest and douse me in pig’s blood, or take off my clothes or something?”

“I just saved you from that, remember?” he demands. “And now you’re accusing me of it?”

“No,” I reply. “I’m not. I...” My voice wobbles, so I stop for a second. He bites his lip, all his anger vanished from one small hitch in my voice. I just made a terrible mistake, but this—the way his emotion shifts so quickly in response to mine—makes me feel safe around him. “I just can’t stand to be tricked once more today.”

His hand moves to the small of my back. “I would never hurt a girl,” he says. “Especially not you,” he adds, more to himself than me. I walk with him to his car, looking over my shoulder the whole time for a teacher who might tell, but the parking lot is mostly empty.

He drives a VW Golf that looks like it was on its last legs in some earlier decade—the door is dented and the roof is bleached by sun. The back is full of football gear, and it smells a lot like the locker room. It’s funny—I knew he was on scholarship but somehow pegged him as part of the BMW/Range Rover crowd.

“Why don’t you drive to school?” he asks as he pulls out of the parking lot. “Your parents can obviously afford a third car.”

I laugh quietly. “We could barely afford the second car.” My parents bought the van used so my mother could leave the house in Penhallow, but it was on its last legs even as we drove it off the lot. “Why would you say that? It’s not like I live in a mansion.”

“It’s a decent house.”

I shrug. “My dad doesn’t make as much as you think, and he tithes a third of his salary to the church, so it’s not like he’s loaded or something. I’m not allowed to drive anyway.”

His jaw locks at the word tithe, as if I’m lying. He exhales and pushes his hand through his hair. “Why the hell are you not allowed to drive?”

“I leave for Bolivia this summer, and I’ll be there for two years. My parents thought it made sense if I just waited until I got back.”

“Bolivia?” he asks. “For college?”

I ignore the heat crawling up my neck. There are so many elements of my church that have sounded reasonable to me for my entire life and sound cult-like outside of it. “In our church, we go away for two years to work in a disadvantaged country. And then we can go to college when we get back.”

He glances at me, his eyes wide. Great. He’s obviously just as weirded out as I’d worried he might be.

“You want to do that?” he asks. “I mean, you’re...smart. You seem like the type of person who’d prefer...to get things going.”

I stare at my lap. “The mission is just what we do. It’s supposed to help set us on the right path for afterward.”

“You still haven’t answered the question. Do you actually want to do it? More than college?”

I chew my lip. Once upon a time I did. Once upon a time it seemed like the gateway to adulthood, to romance. And then, as people started talking about college, my feelings changed. “I don’t know,” I admit quietly. “I would like to go to college, I guess. But it just isn’t an option, so there’s no point in letting myself wish it were otherwise.”

“You’re eighteen. Of course it’s an option. Just tell your parents the truth. What’s the worst that could happen?”

I laugh, though it’s more a miserable sound than a happy one. “You clearly don’t know my parents very well.”

He reaches the outskirts of my neighborhood and I tap on the dashboard. “I should get out here.”

He pulls over. “You’re that scared of getting caught? Or are you worried I’m going to douse you in pig’s blood closer to your house?”

This time my laugh is a happy one. “The pig’s blood, definitely.” We grin at each other as I reach for the door. “Thanks for the ride...and for what you did earlier.”

His mouth opens and closes again. “No problem. You’re going to report them, right?”

“Everyone’s just going to blame me.”

“Well, they’ll blame me with you, because I’m going to report them too.”