Chapter 4

The bus station was packed. The air in the waiting area was thick and stale with a mix of fast food, sweat, and cheap perfume.

I had bought a coach seat. The ride was going to take twenty long hours, but I did not mind at all.

I settled into a window seat and watched the city skyline begin its slow retreat, giving way to farmland, then hills. My heartbeat finally started to level out, and in its place settled a feeling of freedom I had never known before.

I took out my phone and opened the family group chat, the one pinned to the top of my chats and named ‘The Happy Sumners’.

Mom had just posted a photo from the airport lounge. In the picture, three people were smiling so wide it looked like an ad. Mom had captioned it.

Mom: [Taking our baby girl on a beach vacation! A new chapter, a new school, and we're cheering her on every step of the way!]

Below it, a stream of relatives had already liked and commented.

Aunt Miriam: [Bria's gorgeous! You two are so lucky!]

Aunt Lori: [Have a blast. Once school starts, it's all business.]

I stared at the photo for a long moment before I pressed ‘Leave Group’.

After that, I opened each of their contacts one by one: Dad, Mom, and Bria. I blocked every single one of them.

When it was done, I turned off my phone. The bus rumbled south, carrying me away from a home that had never had room for me.

...

That evening, around 8:00 PM, the third-floor windows of the Sumners' apartment sat dark in the old neighborhood.

Eight hundred miles away in a luxury beachfront hotel, Mom had just finished an expensive ocean-view spa treatment. She picked up her phone out of habit and opened the home security camera app.

The feed was pitch black. There were no lights on anywhere.

Mom frowned and checked the time, muttering to herself, "It's 8:00 PM, yet she hasn't turned on a single light. She better not have run off somewhere."

She dialed my number.

"We're sorry. The number you have reached is no longer in service."

She called three times. Every attempt gave her the same recording.

She switched to texting and fired off a message.

Mom: [Paige Sumner, where the hell did you go? Pick up your phone!]

The message failed to send. A red alert popped up underneath it.

[Message not delivered.]

"She blocked me? That little brat has lost her mind!"

Mom shot upright so fast the sheet mask slid right off her face.

Dad waved her off without looking up from his phone. "She's probably at a friend's house. She's a teenager. It's a phase. She'll come home when she gets hungry. Why are you getting worked up over this?"

"Because I told her to hand-wash Bria's silk blouses today! I specifically reminded her before we left!"

Mom was getting angrier the more she thought about it, and her imagination was filling in the blanks.

"She's probably out God knows where, hanging around the wrong crowd! She has senior year coming up! Does she not care at all? She can't go five minutes without causing problems!"

Mom tore through her phone contacts in a fury. After a long search, she finally dug up the number for my senior-year homeroom teacher, Mrs. Tillman, from an old school directory.

She called without a second thought.

The moment the line connected, Mom launched into her tirade at full volume.

"Mrs. Tillman! This is Paige Sumner's mother. I'm sorry to bother you this late. I need to ask you something. That girl hasn't come home all day, and her phone's off. Is she out running around with one of the boys in your class?

"With an attitude like this toward her studies, does she even plan on taking her SATs next year?"

On the other end of the line, Mrs. Tillman had clearly been stunned into silence by the barrage.

Five seconds passed without a word.

Then, a voice came through the receiver, brimming with disbelief.

"Mrs. Sumner, what on earth are you talking about? Paige graduated in June.

"She scored a 1,580 on her SATs and landed in the 99th percentile for the state. You didn't know that?"