Three seconds later, I know she didn’t.

My door flies open without a knock.

“Mom!”

“I’m sorry,” she says, “but you can’t just storm away from every situation that bothers you.”

Bothers is a huge understatement.

“It’s not the situation that bothers me,” I spit out.

Mom crosses her arms over her chest. “Look, I know you don’t want to be in Austin. But we’re here, and you have to deal with it.”

Wrong thing to say.

“You know what?” I jam my fists onto my hips. “I really don’t. I’d rather be anywhere but here. I’d rather be living on the streets of Alphabet City than spend one more night in this house.”

I dig my suitcase out from under my bed—I didn’t want Mom to see I still hadn’t unpacked, but now I don’t give a care.

“What are you doing?” she shouts.

“Leaving!”

I toss my suitcase on the bed so I can stuff in what few personal things I’ve unpacked.

“No!” She places her hands on the lid so I can’t open it.

She is breathing hard. So am I. My blood is throbbing in my ears, pounding with adrenaline and anger. Betrayal.

“No, wait,” she says, her voice no longer a shout. “Sloane, please. I’m sorry. Let me explain.”

I don’t look at her, but I take my hands off the suitcase.

“I didn’t keep it from you because it was a secret.” She releases the suitcase and sits on the edge of the bed. “Making this move was complicated. There were a lot of pieces that had to fall into place. As soon as I knew for certain it was going to happen, that’s when I told you.”

I glare at her as I sit on the opposite side of the bed.

“This has been hard for me, too,” she says. When I open my mouth to argue, she holds up a hand. “Not in the same ways as it has for you, I know. But still hard. Your father and I—”

She shakes her head, looks like she wants to say more, but doesn’t.

Yeah, I know. She and Dad were afraid I’d end up in prison if I kept down the imaginary path they saw me traveling back in New York. They wouldn’t listen when I said it was a brief detour, not a delinquent direction.

“I don’t know what I can do besides say that I’m sorry,” she says softly.

When I don’t respond, she gets up and walks out of the room.

As she closes the door behind her, I whisper, “You could mean it.”

I toss my suitcase back onto the floor. I don’t care anymore if Mom sees that I haven’t unpacked. I want her to see it. I want her to know, every time she looks in my room, that I am ready to leave at any moment.

What a great start to my day. A half-assed call from Dad and a bombshell fight with Mom. Just a typical morning in the Whitaker family.

I’m not going to let those things derail the rest of my day. I have a Graphic Grrl comic to color and publish by tomorrow night. Might as well get on it.

After setting up my laptop on my desk, I get to work. I import the sketches into my photo-editing app. Clean up the feathery pencil marks around the primary line work. Start layering in color on top of the finished drawings.

I lose track of time, lose myself in the work. I’m content to drown in the world of Graphic Grrl forever. At least until my hand starts cramping.

Using the trackpad on my laptop is not the easiest on my wrist. I need my mouse.

The only problem is that I haven’t seen it since we left New York. It isn’t in my laptop case or hiding in the bottom of my backpack. Which means it can only be in one place. A box.

I guess that’s technically a dozen small places.

I lean back in my desk chair with a groan.

The state of my packed boxes is enough to make a tornado run in terror. But since my options are limited to either buying a new one—which means going downstairs and asking Mom to take me—or doing without—which means crippling wrist and finger cramps—I have no choice.

Twenty minutes later I’ve opened half the boxes with no mouse in sight. I seriously don’t remember throwing half of this stuff in.

I’d been in such a fury, I kind of rage-packed. Seriously, I found tissues in one box and a half-eaten sleeve of Oreos in another. It’s entirely possible that I didn’t even pack the stupid mouse.

I rip open another box. This one is full of clothes—at least on top. I pull out the first tee that Tash made for me freshman year. A closeup graphic of a unicorn head shedding rainbow tears on a navy blue long-sleeve.

My favorite. If I weren’t committed to my mourning blacks, I would wear it to school on Monday.

I lift out the clothes and—

“Ha!”

Sitting there, like a shiny white diamond in the clutter, is my mouse.

“There you are,” I say, lifting her up to press a kiss to her sleek surface. “I knew you had to be…”

My mouse love trails off as I see what lies beneath her in the box.

To anyone else it would look like nothing. A little square of flimsy red plastic. But I see something much bigger. I see the words Art Saves Lives writ large on the shell of a construction project.

In a flash I’m back to that night.

Tash and I had met up with Brice and one of his buddies for a late-night coffee. I’m pretty sure it was supposed to be a setup, a blind double date of sorts. Brice’s idea, probably trying to make me forget that he and I were an almost item.

That more than anything is probably why I did it. Why, when Tash said, “We should do something epic tonight,” I had replied, “We totally should.”

An hour later, the pity-date had disappeared and the three of us had rolls of sheet plastic pilfered from the SODA basement supply shelves—Tash somehow acquired a key sophomore year—and were scouting a location worthy of our statement.

“I know a site,” Brice said. “It’s perfect.”

We stood at the base of the half-built skyscraper owned by Brice’s family, a towering beacon of scaffolding and steel beams. It only took us a few minutes of recon to see that security consisted of a single guard in a tiny booth who was really absorbed in his phone.

We snuck by without a sound.

It took four hours of work to arrange the plastic. To make sure it formed the words of our message. To make sure it was stable enough to survive until sunrise.

Back on the sidewalk, we stood looking up at our work. It was, in a word, awesome. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so proud.

Tash and Brice celebrated by making out against the wall that surrounds Central Park.

Rather than risk throwing up all over them, I walked around the corner. Right into a pair of cops. Despite all common sense, I ran. I think making them chase me only made them mad.

The next thing I knew I was being handcuffed, hauled to the station, booked. Released on bail. Sentenced.

If Mom knew that Tash had been there with me, that she’d participated and gotten off without a blemish on her record, Mom would have dragged my BFF in for a citizen’s arrest without a second thought.

She would kill me if she knew I had stopped Tash from turning herself in. No good could have come from her sacrifice. It wouldn’t have lessened my punishment, and it would have destroyed her family. Brice’s parents may have had enough money and pull to keep him from even the mildest of punishments, but the legal fees would have drowned Tash’s working single mom and two little brothers.

Besides, the cops seemed content to think I had done it all myself. And I think a tiny corner of my ego wanted them—and the world—to believe that.

The only good thing that came out of The Incident is that they had to photograph the art for a police report, and to do that they had to keep it intact until morning. Half of New York saw my installation.

Now I’m not so sure that I didn’t pay too high a price for the exposure.

And not just me. Mom and Dad and Dylan have suffered, too.

So did the worker on the crew that came in to clean up after us who fell from the platform. Luckily he was wearing a safety harness, or he would have suffered way worse than a dislocated shoulder and a torn rotator cuff.