It’s so ugly. All of it, this ugliness, because of me.

I hate it.

I think I’m supposed to like it. I think of all the movies I’ve seen where the guy takes a swing for his woman. The girl never gets hit in those movies. Nobody ever runs to the bathroom, hunched over, and throws up half-digested chicken soup in the toilet.

Clearly, I’m doing this wrong. I’m doing everything wrong.

I hear West come into the room, but I don’t know what he wants from me. When I went to the door, before I even looked out on the fire escape, I put my arm around him and he shrank away from me.

It hurt when he did that. Everything that came after just made it hurt worse.

I think, inanely, of the present I gave him. The glittery bow. Two hundred dollars in an envelope.

What did he think I was paying him for?

The ugliness—it’s not just in me. It’s in him, too, and he doesn’t want me to know about it, but that doesn’t make it any less there.

I’m falling in love with a boy who sells drugs, who punches when he’s angry, who knows my body better than I do.

I’m already in love with him. With West, who likes to set the rules, and who doesn’t want me to hand him money in an envelope after I’ve taken his dick in my hand and made him come.

I don’t know who he is, what his past looks like. I can’t know, because he won’t tell me. But his present is ugly enough to make me starkly, painfully aware of my own naïveté.

I’m shaking, clutching cold porcelain, crying.

West crouches down beside me. “Let me look at your head.”

I let him. Even though I’m sick, sobbing more for him than for me. Even though I hate myself.

I curl up in West’s lap on his bathroom floor and let him look at my head, test me for a concussion, wrap his arms around me, and lean against the wall, holding me. Holding me.

Something is wrong with both of us, but I don’t ever want him to let go.

My mom has a thing for The Wizard of Oz. When I was a kid, she found these blue-and-white-checked curtains at Fred Meyer and hung them up in the trailer, where they made everything look shabby. It was only a few months after Dad’s most recent vanishing act, and she was still wearing these cheap sparkly red shoes he’d given her. You know the kind of shoes with a wide toe strap and a stacked heel like a wedge of cheese?

She loved them. Wore them everywhere, even though she was constantly turning her ankles. One night she put them on to go out drinking with Dad, and she came back three days later wearing new clothes, with a tattoo of Toto on her ankle and a shot glass that said Reno. She gave it to me as a souvenir.

After Dad left and Mom lost her job because he took the car and she couldn’t find a reliable ride to town, she had this running joke where she’d click the heels of those shoes together and say, “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”

Then she’d look around the trailer and frown like she was disappointed.

“Still a dump,” she’d say.

But she would lean into me if I was nearby, her shoulder against mine, our hair touching. “At least we’ve got each other, Westie.”

All her jokes were like that—the humor at our expense, the silver lining in the fact that we were a team. A family.

There’s no place like home.

But you can’t go home again—I learned that from being at Putnam. Home changes while you’re away, and you change, too, without noticing. You get in your car, watch the shapes of your mom and your kid sister get smaller in the rearview, and you think it’ll all still be there the next time, as though you went out for groceries or worked two eighteens at the golf course, back to back, then pulled right into your spot in Bo’s driveway like you’d never left.

It doesn’t work that way. You come home on a plane. You land in Portland, hitchhike to Coos Bay, walk to the school to surprise your sister when she gets out for the day—and then when the group of kids with her in it goes by, you don’t even recognize her.

You’ve never seen her clothes before. Her ears are pierced. Her face is different.

And the worst part is, she doesn’t recognize you, either. She walks right past. You have to catch her sleeve, say her name.

I’ve never felt more like two different people than I did that Christmas.

One of me lived in Oregon, with Frankie, Mom, and Bo. Uprooted, worried, frustrated, cautious—but there, where I belonged.

The rest of me was with Caroline.

I fall asleep after my last final and wake up to sharp knocking at the apartment door.

Caroline’s already left, on an airplane by now to the Caribbean with her family, so I know it’s bad news.

I’ve been expecting bad news ever since I knocked Nate down the stairs two nights ago.

There’s no way he’s not going to retaliate. I humiliated him. Twice.

She’s mine. That’s what I was thinking when I did it. I don’t care what happens to me—I’m not going to let anybody talk that kind of shit about Caroline in front of her, to my face, on my doorstep.

The worst part is, I knew she’d fuck with my priorities, mess with my head. I knew she would, and now that she has, I like it.

It’s perfect. I want her to move into my apartment, sleep in my bed, shower with my soap, wear my old shirts around. I want to eat her out before breakfast every morning, rub off on her ass, bury my face between her tits, and come on her hip.

I’m two inches from being so whipped I’ve turned into one of those guys who does whatever his woman tells him to do and grins all the time, like he’s high on the smell of pussy.

I’m a fucking goner for that girl. She owns me.

Which is why, when the knock comes at the door, I’m almost glad for it. I can’t stand myself. Can’t stand that she hit her head, bruising her temple. Can’t stand remembering the wretched, ugly sound she made throwing up in my bathroom.

After she was asleep, I texted Bo, telling him there was a good chance I’d end up behind bars before I made it home for Christmas.

Don’t let nobody in your place without a warrant, he wrote.

By the time I’ve got my boots on, the knocking has turned to pounding, but I take the time to pick up the book Caroline gave me off my pillow, dog-ear the page, and tuck it into my duffel bag.

It’s a good book, and I don’t want it trashed.

There are two of them at the door, a beefy guy with curly blond hair in a black Putnam PD uniform and a skinnier, shorter black guy wearing a red Putnam College Security polo. “Are you West Leavitt?” the blond one asks.

“Yes.”

“I’m Officer Jason Morrow with the Putnam Police, and this is Kevin Yates from campus security. We received an anonymous tip that you’ve been engaging in the illegal sale of marijuana. We need to come in and have a look around.”

I can tell by the way he says this that it usually works. They knock on college kids’ doors—twice a year, three times, whenever there’s a serious complaint. They act civil and ask nice, and these other kids roll right over.

I’ve got nothing in the apartment for them to find, because, despite what Nate seems to think, I’m not fucking stupid. The amount of weed I’m holding—that’s a serious misdemeanor for possession all by itself, a class D felony if they can prove I’m selling it. Which they can, of course, because nobody could smoke that much and function as a normal human being. I keep it in a locker at the rec center, and I go by there two or three times a week, run around the track, lift weights, shower, pocket a few eighths, a few quarters, whatever I know I’m going to be able to sell.

I haven’t grown a plant on campus since the beginning of last year, when I did it more as a stunt than anything. I wanted people to talk. He’s the guy who’s growing the good bud. He’s the one who can hook you up. Once that first crop was harvested, I shut the whole thing down. Too risky.