prove you’re better than him.”
Dane stared at me for a moment with sad, wet, velvet blue eyes. “Maybe, Li, maybe you’re right. But I’m going to do it anyway, and I’m going to do it for more than just that.”
“You’re going to leave!” I screeched so loudly the words ripped through my throat and exploded in the air.
Milo and Oliver flinched. Hudson started toward me then turned away, running to his parents.
“Lila,” Dane started, coming for me with his big, gentle hands extended. “Come on, now.”
“NO!” I screamed as loud as I could, trying to expel the poison that was pooling in my belly, swirling around my sunken heart and spilling through my veins. “NO! You just promised me. You just promised me you wouldn’t leave. What are you doing? What are you doing? You’re leaving me!”
“I’m not leaving right now,” he tried to soothe, palms open to the sky as he crept closer. “I have to join up, complete training…I might not even have to go overseas right away.”
“Dane, we’re at war in Afghanistan,” Diogo rumbled.
Molly swatted at Diogo to silence him, but it was too late.
My eyes bugged out of my head so far I thought they would fall out.
“We’re at war? Why do you want to keep fighting? We just found it. We just found it!” I yelled at him, scrambling backward down the hall to the front door faster because Dane was gaining on me, and if he touched me I’d detonate, and there would be so many pieces I’d never fit back together again right.
“Found what, Li?” he asked calmly, trying to smile, trying to comfort me when he was the one ripping me apart. “You aren’t losing anything. Stop backing up. Let’s talk about this, okay?”
“We just found peace,” I hiccoughed, the bubble of air bursting in my throat, breaking the dam on my tears. They flooded forth, pouring like fire down my cheeks as I blindly reached for the door handle and yanked it open. “We just found peace, and you want more war.”
“Lila,” he said sharply as I turned on my heel and ran into the cool autumn morning. “Lila, get back here!”
But I didn’t go back.
I did what I’d wanted to do every day in that yellow house across the street. I did what I hadn’t wanted to do any of the days since I’d moved in with the Booths until now.
I ran away.
* * *
* * *
The skate park was nearly abandoned so early on a Sunday morning. I sat in one of the sloping bowls of graffitied concrete, letting the sun warm my face, eyes unseeing as they stared up at the clotted clouds blowing like overwhipped cream across the blue sky.
My tears had dried, leaving tight, salty tracks down to my ears, but at least I felt emptied. Purged. Thoughts filtered in and out of my heads thin as gauze. There was a lingering ache in my chest, but it had dulled and deepened. I knew it would be there forever, a crater carved beneath my breastbone where fear and abandonment had nearly sundered me in two.
It was only a matter of time before someone found me.
I thought maybe it would be Milo and Oliver because they always knew how to make me smile, but in the end, it was Jonathon.
It irritated me to see his face in my line of sight, his features in shadow, the sun an aura behind his head. He’d been busy since we moved in, working, and I’d thought, doing school work. In that time, he’d also changed in some indecipherable way. His smiles felt like secrets pressed between his lips. I wanted to part the pages and read what was written there, but I was too young to understand how to ask the right questions to unlock his mysteries. We hadn’t spent much time together, and as a result, I was annoyed with him for being the one to find me. It felt insincere somehow.
He stared down at me without saying anything for a long moment, then shifted out of view so he could lie with his head beside mine, facing the other way.
It was irrational, but I was angry with him too.
He was Dane’s best friend. He should have said something, protested more or better. Stopped him from hatching such a stupid, selfish idea.
My heart burned in my chest, and fire boiled up my throat, so I aimed it at the only person I could.
“You’re an asshole,” I told him. “You