I held my chin high as I sidled past his muscular body, though he didn't move an inch aside to let me pass. I inhaled a sweet breath of his cologne, and the slightly earthy smell of his skin. He'd been drinking the night before, I could tell. Once in the hallway, I heard the door slam shut behind me, so loud it sent a shock through my system. I could no longer hear my mother's giggling outside, but Carson was doubled up along the far wall, apparently tickled to completion about leaving me alone to face off with the thug. I smacked my sister on the exposed expanse of her thigh, rigid with rage.

“Nice playing look-out, jerk!” I hissed—but Carson seemed unfazed. Beyond the shut door, I could hear water stuttering on in some corner. I hadn't realized Landon had a bathroom to himself in his bedroom. I wished I could have gotten a glimpse at that, too.

“You just looked so doe-eyed, gazing at his pictures like that...” Carson wheezed, wiping tears from her eyes. After another half-minute, her storm finally seemed to be abating, while my own face remained red.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” I said, fanning my hands through my hair out of habit. Today's white-blonde streaks were almost the color of my fingertips.

“Oh, baby—I think you do.” Together, we listened as the shower sounds amplified beyond the door. He was pulling back a curtain, in one violent, swift gesture. I imagined his tuxedo pants falling to a puddle around his ankles. I imagined his thick, hairy shins like tree trunks, stretching up to the muscly base of him. I imagined what was swinging between his legs, straight and thick as my wrist, slightly turgid with feeling. I imagined his narrow hips, the symmetrical scoops of his ass, then the hard cage of his chest, humming with fury, caged only by the second skin of dark down. His hair, wet in the shower. His liquid brown eyes, fierce with instinct.

“Oh, Lord,” Carson said. Without my realizing it, she'd come to place a warm, dry palm on my cheek. “Don't worry, kid. I won't tell anyone.” Her own eyes were heavy with sympathy—something I could never abide. Especially not from Carson, who was supposed to know better. The Bennett women didn't need sympathy. The very best—heck, perhaps the only good thing—we'd inherited from our mother was a stubborn sort of pride.

I shook myself free of her hand, then padded back down the rickety staircase to the many boxes in the living room. My mother and her husband-to-be kept a silent vigil there, holding hands on the couch in front of the TV. I expected a ribbing out for my abandoning the work, but they both looked preoccupied.

“We've set a date, darling,” my mother said in my direction, as I came in. I could hear another preacher, prattling from the television. Go figure. Pastor Sterling probably loved him some 700 Club.

“This Saturday. At the church.” When I looked at my mother next, she had little pearls of tears on her lower eyelids. The Pastor had turned to look at her, too. His eyes were kind. Even his withered turtle neck and his tiny head, topped by that outrageous baseball cap seemed...sweet, in that moment. He looked like an echo of his son in those photographs. Joyful.

Carson slid a hand around my waist from behind, managing in her expert way to avoid making eye contact with our mom. She whispered so only I could hear: “Don't forget. You've got two weeks until you're outta here. Two weeks. Anyone could do that.”

Chapter Twelve

Ash

July 23^rd

I ran down the hallway, flip-flops thwacking against the tile. It was hot in the school, and cool sweat dripped down my back like the trails of ice cubes. Nobody bothered to turn on the AC during summer. Or on a Sunday, for that matter.

Which was just as well. High-school had looked like hell to me, so why shouldn't it feel like it, too? This would hopefully be my last trip to Lee, anyways. I needed some final, blasted piece of paper to secure my early enrollment at UT—my very last test scores as a high school student.

I was starting to get excited. But as with most moments in my life in which great change had been promised and later reneged, I was also wary. I'd been to a few college parties, after all, and been largely unimpressed with the pickings on display. There was definitely an extent to which the cheerleaders and the football team at university seemed like the cheerleaders and the football team in high school. And I wondered: would the popular kids at UT be as capable of cruelty as they had been while wandering these hallways? Was I actually preparing to enter into some new world in which I was to be taken seriously?

“Hold up, cowgirl!” cried a familiar voice. And lo, it was Mr. Dempsey—idling around the school like always. He wore a wrinkled Weezer t-shirt and square-framed hipster glasses. In the month or so since I'd seen him last, he'd grown out his goatee and the grey-flecked mop of hair on his scalp. The new look suited him, I had to say.

And for my part, I was finally allowing some of the Texas in. At Carson's urging, I'd started to take advantage of some of Austin's amazing food, which had helped me fill out my typically narrow hips. I'd ceded to the weather, also, allowing myself to be dragged out to the Austin hot springs once or twice with my sister and her bohemian bunch. We'd lay out on the rocks so long that even after multiple applications of sunscreen, I'd become the teensiest bit tan. Which was a first.

In begrudging prep for the wedding, I'd also allowed my sister to “do something about that rat's nest.” She'd hooked me up with a stylist friend of hers, who'd tamed my Winehouse-level bouffant into something sleeker—a razor-length bob that fell to my chin. I felt older and more comfortable in my slightly altered skin, less like a person who liked to hide in her hair. I felt, at last and fully, like I'd expected to on my eighteenth birthday. Like a woman.

“Damn girl…” Mr. Dempsey said affably, immediately biting his lip after the fact. “I'm sorry. That's no way to talk to a student.”

“Former student,” I corrected. “Don't forget, I'm outta here. No senior year for this lady. I'm early enrolling in UT.” I hoped he couldn't see the moisture collecting in little pools below my armpits, or beneath and between my breasts. I opened my mouth wider, to keep from panting. “I'm just darting in to grab my official transcript, or some shit. Who knew college had so much red tape?”

Dempsey laughed. I realized, as he tossed his hair back, that I'd never learned his first name.

“Hell, we're gonna miss you around here, kiddo!” We both laughed at that. “Well, I will, anyways. Hey, how's your summer going?” He'd fallen into a slow lope beside me. We were only a short jog from the counselor's office and I had somewhere to be, but it was so nice to see a familiar face that I decided to let it slide. We'd mosey.

“It's alright. Trying to get ahead on the reading list. Tutoring some middle-schoolers for extra cash. Hanging out with my sister when I can.” The words sounded lame on my tongue, so I finished this litany with a roll of my eyes. He laughed again, and I remembered I had once thought Carson and Dempsey could make a good couple. Suddenly, I was less sure.

“My mom's getting married.”

“Oh, wow! When?”

“Umm. Today.” Now it was my turn to laugh. In the back of Landon's best friend's pick-up, my borrowed dress was currently bunched up in a white dry-cleaner's bag, waiting for me to slither into its silky clutches and become Maid of Honor. The dreaded L and his thug-y friends were out in the parking lot right now, waiting for me. It hadn't been my idea of a thrill to hitch a ride to the ceremony with the Hulk (a.k.a. my step-brother-to-be), but my mother had insisted it would be good bonding time for the pair of us, who had so far done very little to create a harmonious picture for our parents. Also, Carson—that scheming B—had complained of car trouble.