LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 9

      ON NIGHTS WHEN she stayed over, it was Sammi’s habit to slip out before the rest of the Wayward Girls were awake. It wasn’t that she wasn’t welcome there. She came to the House almost every day, since Red and Zihna let all the older kids hang out whenever they wanted. Sammi imagined that she could stay over whenever she wanted, that she could show up anytime, no matter the hour. The front door wasn’t locked. Doors in New Eden weren’t locked. Well, except for the storage sheds and the pharmacy cabinet, a fact confirmed by Colton when he had gone to the hospital—nothing more than a two-room guesthouse behind the community center—to get a cut on his ankle cleaned.

       The reason Sammi sneaked in on her late-night visits, and left early in the mornings, had nothing to do with whether she was welcome in this place, but with her dad. She worried about him. She used to, anyway. The way he always held on to her a little too long with his goodbye morning hugs, the way he was always checking in with her—at meals, after dinner at the community center, when she went to North Island with her friends, hell, even when she was with Valerie. It wasn’t exactly loneliness, and Sammi got that it was his job to worry about her, and the fact that they’d been separated for so long, all the terrible things that had happened, her mom’s death and everyone else’s—so yeah, it was natural that he’d want to keep an eye out for her. But with her dad it was something more. It was like his fear for her made him weak and she had to be the one to constantly remind him that he was strong, and she couldn’t let him worry too much or the weakness would grow.

       And that was why she always made sure to be home, in their crappy little trailer, by the time he got up. It wasn’t hard to do, she knew her dad had trouble sleeping and often spent the middle of the night tossing and turning, but even on those nights—especially on those nights—the sleep that finally found him at dawn was deep.

       But all of that was different now, Sammi reminded herself angrily.

       She was sitting on the floor of Sage and Kyra’s bedroom for the second morning in a row. The borrowed blankets were neatly folded with the pillow centered on top, tucked under Kyra’s bed, because there was too much shit under Sage’s. If—when—Sammi asked Red and Zihna if she could move in for good, she would have to ask for her own room. She loved her friends, and the mess didn’t bother her when she was just visiting, but she needed a place where she could have her things the way she liked them, everything in its place, arranged exactly the same every single day.

       She had that now, she remembered with an unwelcome hollowness. Her dad let her do anything she wanted to the trailer’s only bedroom, and didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow when she took to dusting every single day. Her things—a stone and a necklace that been gifts from Jed, a plastic barrette that had belonged to her mother and was missing a couple of teeth, her journal, a striped coffee cup holding sharpened pencils, the small pocketknife Colton had given her just last month—each had a specific place and Sammi checked them all the time, making sure they were centered on the shelves. She had begged to use the jerry-rigged hand vac, and Dana had finally relented and agreed to let her borrow it once a week, and she went over the matted beige carpet one small row at a time, walking all the way down to the shore to empty the debris into the swirling water of the river.

       All of that was hers, hers alone, and all of it was good. She would give that up by moving here. Even if they let her have her own room, she would be too embarrassed to do the same things here. Besides, she would have to share everything, and even though she had no problem sharing her clothes and her food and her books, even her treasured shampoo and conditioner and lotion and cleanser—she could not bear the thought of her special things disappearing.

       The stone, the necklace, the barrette were all she had left of Jed and her mom.

       Too bad she wasn’t more like her dad, Sammi thought bitterly. He’d started dating within a month of leaving her mom, as if their twenty years together hadn’t even happened. One woman after another—Pilates instructors and pharmaceutical reps and even, for a few strange weeks, Sammi’s old Spanish teacher.

       Her father wasn’t the type to let things get to him. She ought to ask him how he did it. Right after she asked him if it was hotter to mess around with someone who’d been a Beater and recovered. Fucking Cass. They said people like that had higher body temperatures and faster heartbeats than ordinary people, that they could heal from whatever injuries—scratches, bite marks, hickeys?—they got. Fucking Cass.

       Sammi kicked at exposed roots as she took the long way back home. The path wound along the edge of the river, disappearing in hummocks of reeds and reemerging only to dip down to the water and back up the banks. Hardly anyone came this way, and Sammi was in no mood to run into other people before she’d had a chance to change clothes and wash her face. She just wanted to spend a few minutes in the welcome order of her room. Touch the stone and the necklace and the barrette, in order, twice. Once to make sure and once for luck.

       An exhalation followed by a curse: Sammi looked up the banks and saw an uncertain figure struggling through thick overgrowth, grabbing handfuls of grass and weeds to keep from slipping down the slope on her ass. Sammi resigned herself to having to share this moment that she would have so much preferred to keep to herself.

       And then she saw who it was, the thick dark hair grazing the woman’s shoulders, the grosgrain headband. Valerie, with her bag slung over her shoulder, the canvas printed with some art-museum logo—Valerie the do-gooder, supporting the arts even after all the art museums had been ransacked and abandoned.

       “Sammi—oh, Sammi, thank God,” she called down, pushing at a stalk that crossed her path. “I’ve been looking everywhere.”

       Sammi looked past Valerie toward the community center, through wisps of mist and stumpy dead trees, to the yard. She had been so deep in thought that she hadn’t noticed the crowd

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