side and ate the component pieces with a plastic fork while her parents quizzed David.
David, for his part, was all dark hair and eyes and waggling eyebrows on the other side of the table. He managed to get his massive sandwich in his mouth and conduct a conversation at the same time. His speaking voice was clearer, she noticed, like he was putting on a show.
He was messing with her head.
“So what do your parents do?” Stevie’s father asked.
“My mom is a pilot,” he said between bites.
Stevie looked up. David calmly ate a fry and then stacked the remainder into a Jenga pile.
“A pilot?” her father repeated. “That’s very impressive. Must be hard to have a family when you do that kind of job. What does your father do?”
“Well,” David said, breaking a fry in half and examining the fluffy insides. “He runs a fertilizer plant.”
Stevie looked up at him sharply. Was he making fun of her parents? A pilot and someone who ran a crap plant? Stevie felt a wall of rage building inside of her. She may not have agreed with her parents on things, but they were her parents, not for anyone else to taunt.
“Very impressive,” her dad said.
Her face was burning. She put her cup on her cheek for a second to cool her skin.
“So,” her mother said, “we need to talk about what happened. This is a pretty serious conversation we need to have with Stevie, David.”
“Sure,” David said. “I had it with my parents too.”
“And what did they say?”
He leaned back in his chair with that ease that only guys are supposed to possess and that Stevie intended to master.
“It’s horrible,” he said. “But accidents happen.”
“How did the school let this happen?” her mom said. “That stuff should have been under lock and key.”
“It was,” Stevie said. “He broke in.”
“Couldn’t have been that well locked up, then,” her dad said.
“Some people go to a lot of effort to get into locked places,” David said with a long, steady look at Stevie. “He stole someone’s pass.”
“He was famous,” her mom said. “The news is making him out to be a nice kid.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” David said. “The news can’t tell you what people are really like.”
“That’s the truth,” Stevie’s dad said.
Stevie tensed. Please don’t start.
“Stevie and I don’t see eye to eye on some things,” her dad went on. “But the media . . .”
She felt her resolve slipping. Her eyes were going to roll back into her head and she was going to exit via the window and escape. She could live in the mountains and eat rocks.
“. . . tells us what we want to hear, generally,” David said.
Stevie felt her heart stop for a moment. Also, now her father was going to go for him, which would be something to see.
“Interesting,” Stevie’s father said, nodding. “You’ve got a smart one here, Stevie.”
It was like she’d been punched in the gut. Stevie said stuff like that all the time and was told she was wrong. David said it once and he got a nod and a compliment.
Oh, the magic of dudes. If only they bottled it.
“We got a call, Stevie,” her dad said, picking a bit of tomato out of his sandwich. “Edward King called us. Well, his office. His people.”
“Edward King is our senator,” her mom explained to David. “He’s a great man. But Stevie is not a fan.”
Stevie clasped her hands together into a knot and pressed them into her solar plexus.
“We’ve been asked to become the volunteer coordinators for the entire state,” her dad said. “I know you won’t like this, Stevie . . .”
Turn to stone, Stevie. Become a mountain.
“That’s amazing,” David said, slapping on a huge smile. “Congratulations.”
Her parents were both looking at her. This was the test of fire. She could explode. That was her instinct. That mountain she had become was really a volcano. But . . . if she could swallow it—if she could handle this—she would appear to be changed in a way they liked. And if she could do that, then maybe the door was not shut. Maybe, just maybe . . .
It hurt. It genuinely hurt. The muscles of her face resisted. Her throat wanted to close.
But she pushed. She forced herself into—if not a smile, then something that sort of resembled one. She pushed the air out of her lungs, up her throat, and out of her mouth.
“That’s great,” she said.
Two words. That’s great. The worst two words she had