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Instead, it’s as if a different person entirely inhabits my dad’s form.

“We aren’t interested in pressing charges,” he says. Hope and I exchange another look and I slide off the stool, my feet quietly hitting the ground as I step closer to the door in disbelief. “You can drop the investigation.”

“But...” my mother begins, her voice as shocked as mine would be if I were invited to speak, “someone could have died. He had no idea whether there were other people here. You can’t just let him get away with it.”

“There’s no proof, and he’s got an alibi,” my father replies gently. “We aren’t going to heal this community by condemning him in spite of those facts. This is our chance to model forgiveness. He’d already agreed to fix the sod and the plant beds he destroyed before. I’ll have him paint over the damage to the front and it will be as if nothing happened.”

The police comment on how generous he’s being. They don’t know the half of it. My father gives and gives. If I sometimes feel that he’s giving at our expense—like forcing us to move here—it’s only because I’m not yet the person I aspire to be.

“I really don’t want him over here,” my mother says after the police leave, but there is resignation in her voice. She knows my father isn’t going to change his mind.

I don’t want Ford here either, but it has less to do with the fire than it does the memory of him staring at me. There was this sharp, sweet piercing deep in my stomach, one I didn’t want there, one that came mere minutes after I’d asked God to let me feel something again.

All that comes to mind is something else my grandmother used to say when she wasn’t warning me about Satan’s thumbprint on my neck:

Be careful what you wish for.

Two days after the pool party, on what would have been my first day of school if I just could have stayed at Bright Covenant, my mother hands me a cell phone. For a moment I simply stare at it. My parents have long held that cell phones are detrimental, that they encourage teens to value the wrong things, and that studies demonstrate their negative impact on self-esteem. I’d often argued that being the only teenager in the world without a cell phone was impacting my self-esteem more than social media ever could, to no avail.

“We will monitor where you are spending your time, so choose wisely. No social media; no internet. It’s so you can keep in touch with your old friends.” Her eyes flicker away, and my joy is pierced. She probably realized at the pool party, as did I, that my old friends are going to be the only ones I have.

Once I’ve set it up, I text my best friend, Ann, who has had a phone for years. She calls me immediately, telling me what I missed from the first day of school—that all the seniors cried at the opening chapel, knowing it was the last one they’d share. That all the underclassmen and the girls in the lower school did a cheer for the seniors at the day’s end, and then linked hands to form a tunnel for them to walk through.

I’ve helped form that tunnel, year after year, and this would have been my turn. As class prefect, I’d have walked through first. It’s a dumb thing to miss, but I miss it anyway. I miss all the things I won’t get: our final Christmas chapel, our final awards ceremony, our senior retreat in the spring.

Eventually Ann asks how I got the phone and I tell her about the pool party—about the girls wearing so much makeup and almost no clothes, the boys playing football without shirts, all of them ridiculing our one-pieces. Finally, I tell her about Ford trying to burn down our house. “And he seemed so normal, when I saw him,” I add haltingly. It’s not entirely true—there was nothing normal about his lovely face—but it still shocks me that so much evil could lurk beneath it. “Anyway, he’s coming to fix the yard tomorrow and hopefully that’s the end of it.”

“Well,” Ann replies, a scolding tone to her voice, “be sure you steer clear of him. Even if he looks normal, he could still be a bad influence.”

I fight a snap of irritation. I’m not even sure why I’m irritated.

Perhaps because I don’t need her warning me like a parent, or perhaps because her words smother that little spark I felt, saying his name aloud, and when it’s gone...I feel absolutely nothing again. Which I guess is how it’s supposed to be.

We hang up and I finally notice the sketchbook I’d pulled into my lap over the course of the call.

It appears I was trying to draw his face.

I’m working on my mission application the next morning when Ford James arrives. I hear him downstairs talking to my mom—his voice too low and confident for someone our age while my mother’s is tight and wary as she gives him instructions.

The door closes as he goes back outside and I take a deep breath, swearing that I will not look out the window. I return to the application, which is really just a formality. In my church, everyone commits to two years of missionary work after high school whether they want to or not. In an ideal world, I’d go to college instead, but I’m looking forward to Bolivia, too. It’ll be the first of so many experiences: my first taste of independence, first time on a plane, first time leaving my parents and my country. Most of us will return home engaged, or close to it. Every year there are about fifty kids in a cohort, another fifty in the cohort adjacent to ours. It seems like a lot of freedom after the lives we've led thus far.

The low roar of the lawnmower grazes my shoulders like a shiver. I want to look out the window but turn instead to the first essay question: Why do you want to do God’s work in Bolivia? It should be easy to answer. I’ve been planning for this trip my entire life.

Except...I want to go to Bolivia to see a new country and speak a new language and be allowed to dine with the boys, and those are things I’m not supposed to care about at all.

The roar gets louder as Ford nears the house. My gaze jerks involuntarily toward the window at last.

I sort of hoped I’d see all the darkness inside him this time, knowing who he is and what he’s done. But no—he’s still beautiful.

He’s built like a man, and he carries himself like one too—not awkward and wary of those long limbs like the boys back home but swaggeringly certain of them. Even from a distance, I can tell he needs to shave.

The stairs creak and I jerk my head back to my computer, typing nonsense words in case my mother is able to guess what I was doing.

She pops her head in the door and taps on the frame. “I need you to run to the drugstore down the street for me,” she says. “Faith and I are making cookies and I just realized we never got any baking powder last week. Just ignore Ford if he tries to speak to you.”

I hide my sigh. Faith is my mother’s entire world and has been since she was born, which is when Hope and I seemed to stop mattering to my parents. In so many ways, it will be a relief to leave for Bolivia next June.

I go to the garage for my bike. I’m happy to discover Ford is not in the front yard as I roll it onto the driveway, but my happiness has an oddly sour note to it, as if a small hope has been crushed.