Chapter 12
twelve
Logan sat at the end of the lunch table with his sandwich half-eaten and one earbud in. He had been eating alone since day one at Solace High, and it was fine. Trays clattered, sneakers squeaked, kids talked and laughed. He could disappear into all of it if he didn’t look up.
His chair suddenly tipped backward hard.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Just chew.
“Hey, Jailbait. Heard you had some excitement on your street this morning.”
He chewed.
“My mom was walking Duchess, saw the whole thing.” Kolby’s voice came from directly above and behind him, close enough that Logan could smell the cafeteria’s pizza grease on his breath. “Your dad and Greta Dougherty. On the front porch. All over each other.”
Logan set the sandwich down. His hand was steady. He was proud of that.
“Your mom’s not even cold yet, and your dad’s already—”
Logan stood up. He did it fast enough that the chair legs screeched against the floor, and Kolby actually flinched, stepped back, and put his hands up halfway before he caught himself.
The cafeteria didn’t go silent—they were in the corner, and the lunch noise was too loud for that—but the two minions behind Kolby went still.
Logan was taller than him. He hadn’t fully registered that before.
He didn’t have to be afraid of Kolby, because Kolby was a short little ant that he could easily crush.
He balled his fists as heat moved up from his stomach into his chest, the thing his mother used to call his father’s temper, the thing he’d spent years pretending he didn’t have.
He thought of the article he’d found about his Dad’s arrest the other night after their fight. Jason Miller. Head trauma. One punch and he fell wrong.
One punch.
Logan uncurled his fists and stepped around Kolby, left his tray on the table, left his backpack hooked over the chair back, and walked toward the cafeteria door.
“Where are you going, Jailbird?”
He kept walking.
He went past the cafeteria, past the administration office where the vice-principal’s door stood half-open, past the attendance desk where a woman in a yellow cardigan was on the phone with her back to the hall.
Past the trophy case with the football team’s 2019 state championship photo.
Past the front desk, where someone had propped an artificial plant against the wall and it had slowly died anyway despite being made of plastic. Through the double doors.
The cold hit him in the face like a hand.
Nobody came after him.
He stood on the front steps for three seconds, just breathing. The parking lot was half-empty at this hour. The flag on the pole snapped in the wind, a sharp, rhythmic crack. He had his phone. He had his hoodie. He had forty-three dollars in his wallet. That had to be enough to get home.
He went down the steps and turned east, away from Maple Street.
The gas station on the east end of Solace sat where Highway 93 bent and straightened out before it ran north toward Missoula.
A Conoco with two pump islands and a glass-front convenience store that smelled like hot dogs and floor wax.
Logan stood between the pumps with his hands in his hoodie pocket and watched the cars cycle through.
He knew the rough geography. 93 north to Missoula.
Then I-90 east. East was Denver. East was his street, his apartment, the woman down the hall who had spare keys to their unit and who’d left a casserole outside their door every Sunday since Amber got her shift extended at the hospital, which was four years ago now and the woman had never stopped.
East was his room with the glow-in-the-dark star stickers he’d put on the ceiling at age nine and never taken down because he liked the way they looked even when he was too old to say so.
He had forty-three dollars and no plan and the specific clarity of someone who has decided that clarity is overrated.
A man in a Carhartt jacket came out of the convenience store with a coffee, walked to a beat-up F-150, and started filling the tank.
He was maybe forty, broad through the shoulders, face weathered in the way that Montana seemed to require of people who’d lived here long enough.
He looked at Logan the way strangers looked at a sixteen-year-old standing alone by a gas pump at one in the afternoon on a Tuesday — not alarmed, but noting it.
Logan looked back.
The man looked away.
The pump clicked off. He topped it off, the way you do when it matters, hung the nozzle, got in the truck, and left.
Logan stood there another five minutes. Two more cars came and went. A woman in a minivan with a toddler in the back. A guy who filled up without getting out of the vehicle, one of those gas-and-go people, in and gone in under two minutes.
He could feel exactly how it would go — walking up to someone, the words he’d have to say, the explanation he’d have to give, the face the person would make when they looked at him.
A kid alone on a Tuesday afternoon, no bags, no adult.
They’d either say no or they’d say something worse: let me call someone for you, is everything okay, do you need—
He couldn’t do it. He’d never been able to do it. His whole life had been about not needing anything from strangers, and he was not going to break that record at a Conoco in Solace, Montana.
He left the gas station and started walking.
---
The shoulder was wider than it looked from a car.
He’d noticed that before on walks around town, the way roads that seemed to barely have room for two cars going opposite directions actually had several feet of buffer you could stand on.
He walked in that buffer with his hands jammed in his pockets and his head down, facing traffic the way you were supposed to.
Cars blew past him doing sixty, seventy, some faster. The wind off each one hit him sideways, lifted the edge of his hood, found the gap between his hoodie and his jeans and ran up his spine like ice water. He hunched his shoulders and kept walking.
Missoula was sixty miles. He hadn’t done the math on that before he started walking, and now that he was doing it, he shoved it back down.
The Bitterroots were huge on his left, already throwing long shadows across the valley even though it was still afternoon.
The light had that thin, going-fast quality of mountain afternoons in spring, gold at the edges and colder than it looked.
He thought about Kolby’s voice. Your mom’s not even cold yet.
He thought about Amber in the kitchen in Denver at six in the morning, hair still half-down from sleeping, making the coffee too strong the way she always did, humming something to herself that she’d stop as soon as she noticed him watching.
The way she’d say morning, baby, like every morning was the first morning and she was genuinely glad about it.
He thought about how she’d once taped a note to his textbook in middle school that said you’re the best thing I ever did, which he’d seen three kids in homeroom see and had wanted to die, but he’d kept it.
It was still in his wallet. It was in the backpack he’d left on a chair in the Solace High School cafeteria.
He walked faster.
The highway started to climb slightly, and the trees closed in on the right.
The shoulder got narrower where the road curved.
More than one car drifted close enough to the line that the downdraft made him stumble sideways a step.
He kept walking. His calves were starting to ache—he wasn’t in bad shape, but two hours of pavement in worn Nikes wasn’t the same as gym class.
He didn’t cry. He hadn’t cried since Amber died. He was not going to cry on the shoulder of Highway 93 where anyone in a passing car could see him.
He passed a green highway marker for Missoula: 48 miles.
He’d been walking two hours and covered twelve miles.
The sun dropped behind the Bitterroots with almost no warning — there, and then behind the ridge, and then the light was gone and the temperature dropped fast, the way it did in Montana like someone had thrown a switch.
He hadn’t believed Bear the first time he’d mentioned that, but he believed it now.
He pulled his sleeves down over his hands and kept going.
A Forest Service sign appeared on the right: PAINTED ROCKS TRAIL — 0.2 MI. He almost walked past it. Then a truck came around the curve doing eighty with its high beams already on, the light sweeping across him, and he felt something in his chest crack open a little.
He turned and went up the trail and didn’t stop until his legs started shaking. He spotted a downed log just off the path, gray and moss-covered, big enough to sit on. He pushed through two feet of undergrowth and sat down.
The cold came through his jeans immediately.
The forest was dim but not fully dark. The sky, where he could see it through the trees, had gone the pale gray of a fading bruise. He could hear his own heartbeat.
He pulled out his phone.
Two percent.
No service bars.
He looked at the screen. The wallpaper was a photo of his mom, a good one, her laughing at something off to the left.
He’d taken it two years ago in Tucson in the apartment with the dancing skeleton cabinet decals.
She was wearing her green sweater. Her eyes were more blue than gray, which meant she’d been happy that day.
He pressed the side button to light the screen again. Went to contacts. Scrolled.
He stopped at Dad.
He didn’t press call. Couldn’t press call, even if he’d wanted to. He stayed on the contact page, the screen showing Bear’s name in plain white letters. Somewhere in the trees above him, something moved — a branch releasing, a bird dropping from one pine to another.
He put the phone back in his pocket, pulled his knees up to his chest, and dropped his forehead to his knees.
His throat ached. His eyes were burning. The cold was getting into his shoulders now, working through the hoodie seam by seam.
He’d been so sure at the gas station. So sure this was the thing he was doing, this was real and final, and he was going back to Denver because Denver was home and home was where his mother was.
Except his mother wasn’t anywhere anymore. And the apartment was someone else’s apartment now. And the woman down the hall with the casseroles didn’t have a key to his door because he didn’t have a door—
He pressed his forehead harder into his knees and breathed.