“He can’t send you away forever,” she said. “Can he? Is that, like, legal?”

“I don’t think he cares. I mean, they’re technically my family, so it probably is. But I don’t want to go. You’ve got to help me. Let me stay with you. Ask your mom.”

“She’s not home. You want me to call her?”

“Yes,” I said, but deep down I knew by the time she got ahold of her mom and called me back with an answer, it would be too late. They would have already come and taken me. I would be on my way to Caster City with people who were, according to my mom, cold as reptiles.

I hung up and continued to stuff things into my bag. I pulled out my Western Civ book and my math binder and threw them in the trash, keeping only Bless the Beasts & Children (hint, hint, ladies and gentlemen!) and a few pencils and pens. I rolled up the few clothes I had and crammed them inside the bag, cradling the porcelain kitten I’d brought from home. I pulled out Marin’s purse, running my fingers lightly over the fake leather.

I sat with it on my lap and waited, bitterly watching the TV rerun more footage of the tornado destruction. What the news crews couldn’t show was the real damage Elizabeth’s monster tornado had left behind. How do you record the wreckage left in someone’s heart? I pulled out a piece of gum and popped it into my mouth, then smoothed out the foil. I found a pen on the nightstand and drew a picture of a big stick figure holding a little stick figure.

Marin has a dad, I wrote beneath the picture, and then folded the foil into a tiny square and added it to the stash.

Marin has a dad.

Even in her death, she has a dad.

But I don’t.

I never did.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

As predicted, my grandparents arrived before Dani called back. She’d texted—Mom not picking up. Will keep trying—but it was too late to save me.

I refused to answer the knock on the door, forcing Ronnie to get up. He could send me away, but I wasn’t going to make it easy for him.

We hadn’t spoken since I’d told him I hated him. I didn’t know if he was staying silent in an attempt to make me feel guilty, but if so, it wasn’t working. If I’d been the one who’d died with Mom in the tornado, he would never have turned Marin out. He would never have sent her to live with strangers in a strange city.

He opened the door and a white-haired woman with a face as wrinkled and tan as a tree trunk stepped inside.

“She ready?” she said, talking about me rather than to me, as if I weren’t sitting right there. Ronnie nodded and she turned toward me. “You got things?”

“Only a few,” Ronnie interjected. “We lost everything in the storm.”

“Yes, you told me on the phone,” she said, no softness, no tenderness in her voice. As much as I’d gotten tired of hearing everyone tell me how sorry they were, this was worse. It was like she didn’t care at all. Like she was here to pick up an unwanted couch. All business. “Harold’s in the car,” she said, raising her voice. “You eaten? He’d like to hit the diner on the way out.”

“I’m not hungry,” I muttered, forcing myself to stand up. I searched Ronnie with my eyes as I walked past him, hoping he would change his mind. I would forgive him if he let me stay. It would hurt, but I’d pretend he’d never called them. I’d try to understand. But he simply looked down at his feet and let me pass.

I followed Grandmother Billie, who didn’t so much walk with me as walk determinedly ahead of me, her step as steady as a warden’s. And I realized that was what this felt like—being led to a jail cell, my freedom stolen. Actually, this felt worse than prison. At least in prison, my friends could visit me. I’d already lost Mom and Marin—now I was losing Dani, Kolby, Jane, everyone I knew, everything that was familiar to me. What else could possibly be taken from me?

We approached an old, mostly rust and maroon car idling at the curb, Grandfather Harold sitting behind the wheel, squinting in the sun. He pushed a button on the dash with a fat finger, and the trunk popped open.

“You want to put your bags in?” Grandmother Billie asked, lifting the trunk lid all the way.

I shook my head, squeezing Marin’s purse closer to my side. The thought of lowering the pocketbook she loved into the motor oil–scented trunk on top of a tangled snake of jumper cables felt too much like ripping out my lungs and jumping up and down on them. I opened the back door and slid inside the car, which also smelled like oil, mixed with something more organic. Grass? Skin? I couldn’t tell.

Grandfather Harold lifted his chin once to acknowledge me, and my stomach clenched with fear as he put the car into drive, Grandmother Billie slamming the trunk and easing herself into the passenger seat in front of me. I didn’t want to go. Please, Ronnie, I begged inside my head, come out and get me. Make it like the movies, where at the last minute the girl is loved after all, and gets saved by the hero. Be the hero, Ronnie. But our motel room door had slowly swung shut, closing the space between me and the last familiar thing in my life. He didn’t even wave good-bye.

“She ain’t hungry,” my grandmother said, her blunt fingers working to find the seat belt as my grandfather pulled away from the curb and into traffic.

“Well, I don’t s’pose she has to eat,” he mumbled.

“She’s just gonna sit there?”

“If that’s what she wants to do. As long as she knows we ain’t stopping halfway down to Joplin for anything. She don’t eat, she don’t eat.”

“Well, we can’t let her starve to death.”

I chewed my lip and listened to them argue about me, as if I were invisible.

We navigated way too slowly toward the highway. If Grandfather Harold was going to insist on driving like this, we would never get to Caster City. Which would be fine with me.

I stared out the window and thought about the time Mom had taken Marin and me to Branson for an all-girls weekend. I’d watched the fields roll by, thinking that southern Missouri was so many worlds away from Elizabeth. As we passed Caster City and the landscape changed, the Ozark Mountains bursting around us, looking untouched and untamed, I had felt so far away from home.

I remembered that there had been a dead, flattened scorpion behind the curtains in our cabin and I’d freaked out, refusing to step down off the couch until Mom had checked the whole cabin over. But Marin had been fascinated by the bug.

“It’s got poison?” she kept asking, and when Mom would answer, “I don’t know, honey. Some scorpions are poisonous,” Marin would crouch low, her butt hanging inches from the floor, her bare toes pushed into the nap of the carpet, cords of her hair dangling down past her knees, and would stare at it. A few seconds later, she would look up. “Is it the poison kind?” And Mom, checking under a couch cushion or in the linen closet, would absently repeat, “I don’t know, honey.”

At one point, Marin was crouched so low her nose was between her knees and I couldn’t help myself. I tiptoed off the couch and snuck up behind her.

“It moved! It moved!” I shrieked, bumping her in the back with my knees and making her pitch forward.

Marin had shrieked, catching herself just short of falling over, and had shot straight up and run out of the room, bawling her eyes out while I laughed.

“Really, Jersey, did you have to?” Mom said, exasperatedly chasing after my sister.

Marin had spent the whole rest of the weekend terrified, crying and running from every bug she saw.

Sitting in the backseat of my grandfather’s car, heading toward the part of the state where I’d seen my first and only scorpion, I thought about how I’d done that to her. I’d taken away her fascination and replaced it with fear. She’d died scared of bugs, because that was how I’d shaped her.

Without thinking, I reached into her purse and pulled out another stick of gum, cramming it into my mouth with the first. I spread the foil out on my knee and drew a picture of a stick figure crouched over a little black blotch on the ground.

Marin loves scorpions, I wrote. I liked that truth better. I folded up the foil and dropped it in with the others, then leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t have to see the chain stores and strip malls fade away into the fields and farms that were to become my new reality.


Neither of my grandparents bothered to shake me awake. Instead, they relied on the slamming of their doors—whoomp! whoomp!—to alert me that we’d stopped. I lifted my head from the window, wiping my damp cheek on my shoulder, and blinked the parking lot into focus. My grandfather had come around the car and was standing next to my grandmother, both of them staring at the doors of a grungy-looking diner.

After a few seconds, my grandmother turned and bent to look in the car window. “You comin’ in?” she said, her voice muffled by the closed window.

I didn’t answer, didn’t move. Wasn’t sure how to do either one. So she simply nodded once and turned away. Together, they walked into the restaurant without me.

I shook my head and gave a disgusted little snort.

I didn’t want to go inside. I wasn’t hungry—my stomach was too tied in knots to even think about eating—and I really didn’t want to have to try to make conversation over dinner with these two people. But it had been days since I’d had any sort of real meal, and I knew that now it was up to me to make sure I did things like eat and shower and sleep. Nobody else was going to care.