“Where the hell have you been?”
It was the first thing I heard when I walked through my front door. Bo had just dropped me off after spending a couple hours down by the river. And in the couple hours, apparently, Mama had gotten up and Daddy had come home.
And they were furious.
“I … was with Bo,” I said. “I left a note. Didn’t you see it?”
“We were worried sick,” Mama said. She was standing in front of the couch. Like she was just too angry to entertain the idea of sitting down. “I woke up and you were gone, and you hadn’t taken your phone with you. I was on the verge of calling the cops.”
“I was just down the road,” I told her. “At the river. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal? The big deal?”
“Honey,” Daddy said from his seat in the recliner. His voice was a lot calmer than Mama’s. It almost always was. “Your mother and I are a little worried about you. We heard about your outburst in church the other day. Christy’s parents told us. Christy was real upset about something you said to her. And that just … It doesn’t seem like you.”
“And now you’re taking off without warning.” Mama sounded like she was teetering on the edge between fury and heartache. I couldn’t tell if the cracks in her words were tears or barely held-back rage. Or both. “And going to parties? Is this because of Bo Dickinson?”
“What? No.”
Although, I guess, it sort of was.
“I don’t understand,” I said, twisting my cane in my hands. “I’m sorry I forgot my phone, but I left a note. I told you I’d be back soon.”
“You think a note is enough?” Mama demanded. “You didn’t say where you were going. We didn’t have a way to check on you if we needed to. You could’ve gotten hurt or lost or—”
“I was with Bo,” I said. “I told you—”
“We barely know Bo, sweetheart,” Daddy said. “We don’t know yet how much we can trust her with you.”
I frowned. Trust her with me. I knew what that meant. He didn’t know how well he could trust her to take care of me. To babysit me. Was that how he saw my friendship with Christy, too? Had she just been my responsible babysitter?
“You know her better than you knew a lot of Gracie’s friends,” I pointed out, trying to keep my voice calm. “And she was allowed to go out with them after school. You didn’t always know where she was, but—”
“That’s different,” Mama said.
“How?”
I knew the answer. I’d have to be a fool not to. But I wanted to hear it from them.
They didn’t respond, though. Instead, Mama ignored me. “You haven’t been acting like yourself,” she said. “And your father and I think—”
“How?!” And this time, I didn’t bother to keep my voice down. That same anger that had filled me the other day in church was back, but without the hint of meanness. And for the first time in my life, I was back talking my parents. “How am I different from Gracie? How?!”
I didn’t have to see their faces real well to know they were both shell-shocked. Gracie was the one who yelled, not me. Never me.
Until today, at least.
And they didn’t even know about the beer.
Daddy was the one to recover. And this time, he was the one to do something he’d never done before. In a voice quiet as a snake’s hiss he said, “You’re grounded. For a month. You go to school. You come home. And that’s it.”
“Daddy—”
“That’s. It.”
And no matter how mad I was, I knew better than to question him anymore.
“How much longer you grounded for?” Bo asked.
“Eight days.”
In the three weeks since my parents had locked me up, the season had fully changed. It was early October, and the wind was getting cold.
I’d been worried, at first, that my new friendship with Bo would blow away, fall like one of the leaves on our maple trees, while I was trapped in my house. But she’d surprised me. Bo had been at school every day. And even though she never said so, I liked to believe it was because she wanted to see me. We ate lunch together, walked together in the hallways, and even managed to get seats next to each other in English. Which was great, since Bo understood poetry so much better than I did.
There were lots of rumors going around about me. Some people thought I must’ve gone crazy. Others called me a slut. Not because of anything I’d done. Just because when it came to the Dickinsons, all their friends were guilty by association. But Bo seemed more bothered by what people were saying about me than I was. For me, none of it mattered as long as I got to spend every free minute of the school day with her.
And then, when I got home, I only had to wait an hour or so before Bo would call me. My parents hadn’t made any rules about the phone, so I’d sit at the kitchen counter, doing homework, and waiting for the ring.