Chapter Two
I HAD A system, and the system worked, which meant I didn’t spend much time thinking about what would happen if it stopped.
Up at six. Coffee in the kitchen while the clubhouse was still quiet enough that nobody tried to feed me or ask how I’d slept.
Out the door by seven, across the bridge around seven-thirty, and most mornings I caught the river right when the sun came up over it, all pink and gold and ridiculously pretty for something I was driving over half-awake with coffee breath.
Those ten minutes were mine.
I’d earned them by getting up at an hour no nineteen-year-old should willingly see.
The drive was probably my favorite part of the day, which I would have admitted to exactly nobody because saying you loved forty minutes alone in a car made people look at you like they should start checking in more often.
But I did. I liked the road, liked the radio low enough that I could think over it, liked watching the compound disappear in the mirror and Charleston start showing up ahead of me.
Nobody needed anything from me in the car.
That was probably the real reason.
For forty minutes I wasn’t Brenda’s girl or somebody the club kept an eye on or the person everyone checked before they went to bed. I was just Amy driving to school, usually five over the speed limit, occasionally singing badly when nobody could hear me.
I liked that Amy.
Campus was already loud when I parked, full of people carrying coffees and backpacks and talking at a volume I could never understand before eight in the morning.
Most of them seemed younger than me even when they weren’t, which wasn’t their fault.
They’d just had different lives. I’d spent my first few months here being irritated by how easy everything seemed for them, how they’d complain about roommates and parking tickets and somebody leaving them on read like those were things worth losing sleep over.
Now I mostly let them.
Must be nice.
And I meant that less bitterly than I used to.
Bio was at eight, and I was good at it. Really good, actually, which still felt strange enough that I noticed every time.
The professor called on me twice that morning and I got both answers right, and nobody in that three-hundred-seat lecture hall knew anything except that the girl with purple hair knew what happened to a cell membrane under whatever condition he was talking about.
They didn’t know where I slept, or who Brenda was, or that motorcycles came and went outside my bedroom window most nights and I knew the sound of half of them without trying. They definitely didn’t know what my last name used to mean in another house.
To them I was Amy.
Purple hair. Good at biology.
I liked being that easy to explain.
“You’re doing the face.”
Sawyer dropped into the seat beside me two minutes after class started, because Sawyer believed arrival times were more of a suggestion than a rule.
“What face?”
“The one where you’re secretly impressed with yourself.”
“I got both questions right.”
“See? That face.”
I tried not to smile. “You’re just jealous.”
“Deeply.” He broke his muffin in half and handed me a piece like he always did.
I took it like I always did. Neither of us mentioned that I hadn’t asked for it.
“I need your notes from Thursday.”
“Of course you do.”
“I was busy.”
“You were asleep.”
“I was busy being asleep. It’s a full activity.
” He said it easy, but I caught the thing under it, the little skip, the place where the real answer lived and didn’t come out.
Thursday night was one of the ones he didn’t talk about, and I didn’t ask, because I had about nine hundred of those myself and knew exactly what it felt like to have somebody go poking at one.
So I bumped my elbow against his and opened my notebook.
“I’ll send them.”
“See? Best girlfriend ever.”
“Fake girlfriend.”
“Details.”
Half the school thought we were dating, mostly because somewhere around the second week we’d realized correcting people was more work than letting them be wrong.
It kept guys from asking me out and then wanting an explanation when I said no.
It kept certain questions from following Sawyer around before he was ready to answer them.
Worked for both of us.
The funny part was that we probably knew each other better than half the actual couples on campus. Sawyer knew when I was pretending I’d eaten. I knew when his smile went too bright. He knew which subjects to leave alone without me asking. I knew his too.
No romance involved. That was what made it safe. He was the first person my age I’d ever let close enough to know when I was lying.
“Somebody was looking at your hair in lab,” he said around a bite of muffin. “Tall girl. Third row. She spent ten minutes working up the courage to ask what color you use.”
“They always want to ask.”
“So tell her. It’s a good color.” He tilted his head at me, studying it the way people did, like the answer might be written in there somewhere. “How’d you land on it, anyway? You never said.”
“Just liked it, is all.” I gave him the same thing I gave everybody, a quick little shrug that made it seem like there wasn't anything more to tell. “Wanted something that was mine.”
That part was even true. It just wasn’t everything, and this particular thing wasn’t for a lecture hall on a college campus, wasn’t for anybody, really.
I’d chosen the color a long time ago, for a reason I kept folded up small and carried where nobody could get at it.
People saw it every day, the world got to look right at it, and not one of them knew the first thing about what they were looking at.
I liked it that way. Everybody saw it. They saw it every single day and probably thought I just really liked purple. Nobody knew why it mattered to me.
I liked that.
***
After classes we went to the coffee place a couple blocks off campus, the one we’d started going to sometime last fall and then kept going to until apparently that was how a place became yours.
Sawyer spent five solid minutes doing an impression of our chemistry professor that sounded nothing like him and somehow captured him perfectly, and I laughed loud enough that a woman at the next table looked over. That only encouraged Sawyer, obviously.
A guy at the counter clocked Sawyer for a second too long, and I watched my friend go careful and bright the way he did, the shutters coming down behind the smile, and I bumped his knee with mine under the table. Just so he’d know I saw. Just so he’d know he wasn’t doing it alone.
“You’re a good fake girlfriend,” he said.
“Best you’ll ever have.”
“Low bar. You’re the only one I’ve had.” He stole my coffee, drank from it, made a face, gave it back.
“Can you hang out tonight? Or are you going back to the — ” he did the little wave he did instead of saying compound, because he’d been out there exactly once, just long enough to drop me at the gate and get a good hard look from everybody with a patch, and he wouldn’t go back if he had any say, and he didn’t. “Fort Murderbike.”
“It’s not — ” I started, and didn’t finish, because it kind of was, from the outside, and he wasn’t wrong to worry, and I loved him for worrying even though he had it upside down.
He thought the danger was the place. He didn’t know the place was the safest I’d ever been. He didn’t know why I needed it to be.
I rolled my eyes, but he wasn’t completely wrong about how the place looked from outside. Razor wire, bikes, armed men, locked gate. Sawyer saw danger.
I saw Brenda yelling at Josie because he didn’t put enough salt in something.
Different perspective.
“I’m going back,” I said. “Brenda needs my help tonight. She talked Josie into a lowcountry boil.”
“Brenda.” He said her name like she was already one of his favorite people.
He’d only met her once, when the three of us went to dinner a couple weeks ago.
Brenda had taken one look at him and decided he needed feeding.
She spent the whole meal pushing the bread basket at him, ordering things she thought he’d like, and asking him about a hundred questions.
Sawyer loved her by dessert.
Most people did.
“Tell her I said hey. And tell her the boil sounds disgusting, but I support it.” He pointed the last bite of muffin at me. “And text me when you’re across the bridge so I know Murderbike didn’t get you!”
“You know that’s not what it’s called.”
“You still haven’t told me what it is called.”
“Yes, I have.”
“A clubhouse is not a name, Amy. It’s a description.”
“I always text you.”
“You do.” He looked at me a second, and the goofy went out of it, and it was just the two of us and the truth for a beat, the way it got sometimes. “You seem good lately, Ames. Like, actually. You seem like you.”
I didn’t know what to do with that.
Compliments were easy when they were about a test score or my hair. Things like you seem like you got inside somewhere and stayed.
So I did what I always did.
Put it away to think about later.
“I am good.”
And standing there in the late-afternoon light with Sawyer across from me, a biology quiz I already knew I’d aced and Brenda waiting for me later, it was mostly true.
Mostly was enough.
***
The drive back always felt different.
Same car. Same bridge. Same forty minutes.
Different direction.
By then the day had started wearing on me, and the farther I got from campus the more aware I became of where I was headed. Not because I hated the compound. I didn’t. It was home, or as close to that word as I’d ever gotten without immediately wanting to argue with it.
At the compound, people knew too much.
They knew when I hadn’t slept. Knew when I skipped breakfast. Knew which door was mine and which nights I kept the light on. Brenda could read one look on my face and start making coffee before I’d admitted anything was wrong.
I’d gotten very good at planning ahead. Most days I crossed the yard without turning my head, which meant I didn’t notice whether he was outside, what he was doing in the garden, whether smoke was coming from the chimney, or if his bike was parked beside the steps.
The fact that I knew all of those things without looking was beside the point.
I was doing great.
At the top of the bridge I caught a red light and texted Sawyer.
Across. Unmurdered.
His reply came before the light changed. A thumbs up and knife emoji.
I laughed alone in the car.
Then the light went green and I drove down the other side toward the compound, toward Brenda and dinner and the room I slept in, and when the gate came into view I turned the radio down even though it hadn’t been loud.
Habit.
The prospect waved me through, and I lifted a hand back as I drove toward the clubhouse, but for one second my eyes wandered past it, down through the trees toward the cabin, before I caught myself.
“Nope.”
I said it out loud to nobody, and kept my eyes straight ahead.