in seventh grade. And that was when she started calling him Lief.
She blew on her nails and checked them. They were dry. She applied the lipstick and gloss.
She had stopped growing then. She used to be a chubby little girl, and now she was a skinny short girl with a couple of bumps on her chest that were supposed to pass as boobs. Her Goth, biker-chick look meant no one would expect her to be all giggly.
She started looking up suicide clubs on the internet until Lief had caught her and taken her to a counselor who told her she was angry. Duh. She had to sit with that lame counselor every week, and on top of that, they did some stupid grief counseling with all grown-ups. She almost got back to liking Lief after he said he thought the counselor was lame, too, and that a grief group for adults was no place for her and refused to take her. She liked him for that.
They might still be in L.A. where she was born and had lived right up to ninth grade, if she hadn’t gotten in some trouble, and she might not have gotten in trouble if her friends hadn’t all disappeared on her. First it was because they couldn’t stand her feeling sorry for herself, then she wasn’t like them anymore with her black clothes and weird hair. So she found herself a few new friends who did things like get into their parents’ medicine chests, score a little pot sometimes, lift money from their moms’ purses and dads’ wallets—for the pot, of course—and, about the only thing she found any fun at all, snuck out after the folks were asleep. They didn’t really do anything; they hung out where they wouldn’t get hassled, smoked some cigarettes sometimes. Bitched about the rules. Courtney wasn’t into the pills and pot; she just experimented a little. She felt weird and bad enough; she didn’t like not knowing how she was going to feel. She pretended, mostly. She had to. She couldn’t stand the thought of being all alone again. If the good kids dumped her and the bad kids dumped her, who was left?
So Lief said, “This isn’t working, this city. You find too much trouble and I’m sick of the noise and traffic. We’re getting out of here. I’m going to find us something sane. I’d like if we could get back to at least being friends, like we used to be. And you could use a chance to start over. Maybe on the right side of the law?”
Now, Courtney had not wanted to move. Period. Even though she’d lost her old friends and didn’t like her new ones. There was something about boxing up her life and putting it on a truck, moving away from where she’d been with her mom that just freaked her out, even though she knew her mom wasn’t coming back.
She liked the idea of getting back to being friends with Lief, though she didn’t believe he meant that. She figured he meant getting back to her looking more like she used to. But the big problem was, this wasn’t going to work—rather than getting back to one hair color, she was thinking about many piercings and a few tattoos…. How long before he just gave up? How long before he just turned her in, told the cops she wasn’t his daughter anyway, go ahead and take her, find a place for her? Because she figured he was only doing this out of some promise he’d made to her mom. And she also figured that he’d get over it and have the locks changed or something. Every time he looked at her, he winced. He hated the multicolored hair, the jagged cut, the black clothes, and for some reason she couldn’t really understand herself, they couldn’t pass ten words without getting into it.
She looked in the mirror—her hair was wild and crazy, her eyes dark and scary. Perfect as far as she was concerned.
So. They’d had another argument. This one was about homework. She told him it was done; he said, “Let me see it.” She said, “No.” He said, “You’re getting a D in both math and English and you have a high IQ—I have to see the homework.” She told him he’d have to trust her and he’d laughed, said she’d have to earn that. She said she’d tear it up before she’d turn it over. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Finally, struggling