Chapter Two

Honor moved through the trailer like she was defusing something.

Uncle Tanner’s chair was empty, which meant he could be anywhere — passed out in the bedroom, stumbling around the kitchen, already working on his first drink of the day. An empty chair was never actually good news. She slipped into the kitchen and fed two slices of bread into the toaster, pressed the lever down, and stood very still, listening.

The bellow came from the back of the trailer.

“Honor! You lazy bitch! Where are my fucking keys?”

She didn’t answer. She hadn’t touched his keys. He’d probably left them in the truck when he staggered in last night, the same way he left everything everywhere, and then raged at her when the world didn’t put itself back together by morning. She looked at the toaster. Looked at the back door. She knew she should go. But her stomach was a hollow, gnawing thing — dinner had ended on the floor last night when he’d shoved her into the table — and she couldn’t quite make herself leave without something in it.

She shouldered her backpack and waited.

He came out of the bedroom like a weather system. It was barely seven in the morning and he already smelled like last night’s whiskey sweating out through his skin. His eyes found her immediately, the way mean eyes always do.

“Where’s my coffee?”

She looked at the coffee maker. He followed her gaze to the empty carafe. In the chaos last night she’d forgotten to set it up, and now the silence where the coffee should have been was its own kind of accusation.

The backhand caught her across the face before she could move. Her ear rang.

“Useless.” His voice had that low, grinding quality that was somehow worse than the shouting. “Fat, ungrateful whore. I put a roof over your head, I feed you, and you can’t manage one goddamn thing.” He grabbed a dirty mug off the counter and hurled it at her head. She dropped, and it exploded against the back of the stove in a spray of ceramic shards.

The toast popped up.

She snatched it with both hands, burning her fingers, and ran. Tanner was blocking the back door so she cut around the counter and hit the front door at a dead sprint, shouldering through it into the cold morning air. She heard him crashing after her through the living room, swearing, knocking something over. She didn’t look back. She ran for the tree line, taking the shortcut through the woods to the bus stop at the bottom of the road, because she knew with the absolute certainty of long experience that he wouldn’t follow her into the forest.

She didn’t stop until she reached the road.

The bus stop was just a boulder beside a road sign. She was always the only kid here. She sat down and pressed the back of her hand to her cheek, feeling the heat of the bruise already rising, and ate her dry toast in small bites, staring at the trees. She’d wanted butter. Jam. Anything. But dry toast was what today was, and dry toast was better than nothing, and nothing was what yesterday had been.

She pulled her grey hoodie up over her head and arranged her hair carefully around her face.

It was an old game. She was good at it.

School was almost as bad as home. Almost. The difference was that at school, no one could hit her. They just made her wish, sometimes, that the floor would open up.

She’d been the outcast since elementary school — the weird kid, the quiet kid, the easy target. She’d learned to make herself small and unremarkable, to slip through hallways like a ghost, to be so thoroughly forgettable that cruelty couldn’t find purchase. It worked, most of the time. And she genuinely liked learning. That part had never changed. She was a good student, and school was the one place where being smart counted for something, even quietly, even anonymously. Her plan, such as it was: finish. Graduate. Get a diploma and get out — find work in the city, find a room somewhere, find a life that didn’t smell like cigarettes and cheap beer and barely-contained violence.

Uncle Tanner was not forever. She just had to survive him until she wasn’t legally required to anymore.

The bus pulled up and she climbed on and folded herself into an empty seat near the back. Nobody looked at her. Good. On a good day she was invisible, and invisible was safe.

The only real problem so far this year was her locker.

Specifically, its location — directly next to Mark Pickman’s locker. Mark was the captain of the football team and had apparently decided that his primary purpose in senior year was to make her aware of how little she mattered. His regular audience included Aaron Mortem, whose father owned the slate quarry and was the closest thing Mount Tabor had to old money, and Adam Turner, whose father was a doctor in Rutberg and who had inherited the particular brand of cruelty that comes from never having been told no. The three of them together were a small, self-congratulatory disaster.

She got off the bus early and walked fast, hoping to clear her locker before Mark came upstairs.

She almost made it.

She had her English binder in hand and was reaching to close the door when he materialized beside her, shoulder-checking her hard into the neighboring locker. “Hey. Move. I can’t get to mine with your ass in the way.”

He slammed her locker shut for her. The little crowd that trailed him like remoras laughed, because they always laughed, because that was their function. She didn’t react. She pulled her hood lower, kept her eyes down, and walked away down the hall toward AP English. One reliable mercy of being a good student was that the jocks were never in her advanced classes. Whatever room Mark Pickman occupied, she didn’t have to be in it.

She took her usual desk at the back by the window. She liked the window — the trees were close on that side of the building, and when things got bad she could look into them and feel slightly less trapped. She got out her book and binder and pen and waited.

The bell rang. No teacher.

The class dissolved into noise almost immediately, the way classes do when there’s no authority present. Honor sat quietly and looked at the trees. After a few minutes the door opened and Mr. Leonard came in, rapping his knuckles on the nearest desk.

“Alright, settle down. Mrs. Dipalma is starting her maternity leave today.” He paused for the predictable murmur to pass. “This is Mr. Shepherd. He’ll be covering the class until she’s back. I expect you to give him the same respect you’d give any member of this faculty.” He glanced at the man beside him. “Mr. Shepherd — first period.”

Honor watched from behind the curtain of her hair as the substitute set his briefcase down and shrugged off his jacket.

He didn’t look like a teacher. He looked like someone who’d been asked, at the last minute, to dress like one. The dress shirt and tie were clearly uncomfortable on him — he tugged at the collar almost immediately, with the expression of a man who’d made a regrettable decision. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with dark shaggy hair pushed back from a face that was all strong lines and angles. His eyes were a sharp, pale grey and they moved across the classroom with a kind of careful attention that felt less like a teacher taking attendance and more like someone scanning a room out of long habit.

Then he did something strange. He went still for just a moment — barely perceptible — and lifted his chin slightly, like he’d caught a scent on the air.

Honor frowned and looked down at her notebook.

“So.” His voice was easy, unhurried, like someone who’d learned to take up exactly as much space as he wanted and no more. “I do things a little differently than Mrs. Dipalma, but we’ll cover the same ground. I heard you had essays due — if you’d pass those forward, that’ll help me get a sense of where everyone is.”

Honor slid her paper out. Everyone else’s was printed, clean white sheets from laptops and printers. Hers was handwritten on notebook paper, her small, careful cursive filling the lines. She’d meant to use the library computers over the weekend. That hadn’t happened. She passed it forward and stared at the window and told herself it probably didn’t matter.

The class proceeded the way AP English usually did — discussion, some back and forth, a few kids who liked the sound of their own voices. Honor listened and said nothing and took notes when something seemed worth keeping. She’d learned that she could absorb more by staying quiet than she ever could by performing participation.

Near the end of the period Mr. Shepherd passed around a sheet. “List of American authors. Sign up for whoever you want, read three of their books, write a report on each, and put together an overall analysis at the end. First come, first served — if your favorite’s taken, pick someone else.”

The sheet worked its way around the room and reached her last, as things usually did. All the authors she knew were gone — Steinbeck, Hemingway, Morrison, all claimed. She scanned what was left and found an obscure name she didn’t recognize, some regional writer from the fifties whose work apparently hadn’t been assigned in years. She wrote her name next to it and passed the sheet back up.

The bell rang. She was packed and out the door before most of the class had pushed back their chairs.

She didn’t look at Mr. Shepherd on her way out.

She almost didn’t notice that his eyes followed her to the door.