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“That would make a pretty good subject for my documentary,” he says, and my head jerks up.

“You can’t...I’d get in so much trouble. We don’t even mention Mary Joyce in my house. Like...never.”

He leans back on his palms. “Doesn’t that seem kind of extreme to you?”

“A lot of things are starting to seem extreme to me,” I admit quietly. Like my parents refusing to let me read Fahrenheit 451 or even explaining why I couldn’t read it. And yes, the thing with Mary Joyce is probably the most extreme of all.

“So maybe we just talk about you moving here,” he says. “The good parts, the bad parts. It would be kind of interesting to see this world from the eyes of someone who isn’t accustomed to it. Almost like you time-traveled.”

Sometimes it feels that way, but I’m also not positive I should be making Bright Covenant sound like a repressive cult from a horror movie. “Should I start with Mac McAllister giving me a fat lip and breaking my glasses, or the time the Kendalls stuffed my locker with panty liners?” I ask.

He kicks my foot. “Come on—it can’t be all bad. Like, what was the biggest shock for you?”

I bite my lip. “I guess…the lack of rules? Like we have a dress code here, but almost no one follows it. Your library is full of books that weren’t available in mine. You can walk into class with food you ordered off DoorDash and curse in the halls and grope each other...”

My face heats, and I stare at the grass. I wasn’t trying to reference what he did that day against the lockers.

I barrel on before he can address it. “In my community, you don’t even really talk to the other gender—not until you leave for your mission trip after graduation.”

“So, you’d never talked to a boy in your life until you got here?” He sounds aghast, and I suppose I can’t blame him. I’m sort of aghast too. There are lots of negative aspects to having girls and boys in the same school—like what happened in the locker room—but there are also benefits. I like the guys who sit with us at the lunch table. I like Ford too. I’d have missed out on all of this if I’d stayed in New Hope.

“It’s not as if we were entirely segregated. If my parents’ friends had sons, we’d see them. But I attended a girls’ school and other than that, there wasn’t much opportunity. The mission next year will finally change that. Most of us come back engaged.”

His nostrils flare, a tiny hint of disgust, before he masters it. “Engaged at age twenty? That doesn’t seem...young? And what about college?”

“A lot of us don’t go, but we go together if we do.”

He doesn’t look impressed by that either. “So do you think moving here was a good thing or a bad thing, then?”

I really have no idea how to answer that question. I sort of think it’s been bad but only because it’s made me realize how much I am missing out on. “The good thing is that I’ve learned that a lot of what I thought about outsiders was wrong. Like, a year ago, I’d have thought a kid who broke the dress code or shouted in the halls was simply bad. There was no middle ground. The negative is that I’m also seeing how much freedom everyone here has, like all of you guys can choose your college and choose your major and move across the country if you decide to. I guess it makes me wish I had some of that freedom too.”

“Some people would argue that both of those are good things,” he says.

“Except now I’ll go on my mission knowing what I missed out on, or I don’t go and then I lose my family.” I shoot him a glance. “Or maybe I’ll lose them because I’m interviewing the kid who vandalized our house.”

He grins at me, then it fades. “As bad as your father doesn’t want us talking, my sister doesn’t want it ten times as much.”

It seems unfair to me, but I was plenty unfair to Ford for a long time, too, and based on very little. Sometimes you just need a place to lay the blame. I let a lot of it fall on him, undeservedly.

“I’ll work on my interview questions tonight,” I tell him.

“Get some photos together too, okay? Like...pictures of you growing up. I’ll get some peewee football pics for yours. Oh, and give me your cell in case there’s something specific I need.”

I freeze. I can just picture the punishment I’d receive if Ford’s name came up on my phone.

“My father monitors my cell,” I whisper.

He rolls his eyes. “Of course he does.”

I swallow. There’s a solution to this—the app Kappy downloaded, but I’d really, really need to trust him. If he told anyone, it would be on Hallpass the next day, and I’d lose my phone entirely.

“There’s this app, though,” I whisper.

Because yes. Even if it’s insane...I trust Ford, just like I trust Kappy.

I think I trust them both more than I do my own parents.

We’re in the middle of dinner when my phone buzzes.