With a sensation like a sinking rock in her stomach, she dropped the applications in the kitchen trash can, shoving them under the morning’s coffee grounds so she wouldn’t be tempted to pull them back out again.

Two months later Violet finally moved out of their childhood home, though she didn’t go far. She’d once imagined herself moving to an exotic location, studying her birds, and making a life for herself. A life of her own choosing. In reality she only moved a couple miles downriver and took a job teaching science to giggling, restless sixth graders at Sugar Bend Academy.

It wasn’t quite what she’d envisioned—that onetime desire to see new places, do new things, push herself, become someone new—but she had a job and she had a new place to live. And Trudy was still close. That was what mattered.

Four

Tyler jangled his keys, then opened the door to his truck and waited for the coming onslaught. It arrived a second later in the form of pounding paws, orange fur, and an oversized pink tongue. His golden retriever didn’t wait for permission before bounding into the truck and up onto the passenger seat, head out the window, tongue lolling.

“Good girl, Ruby.” Tyler ruffled the top of her head, then, with his truck bed full of pine straw, pulled out of Holt’s parking lot and onto the highway in the direction of his morning delivery. When he came to the turnoff for Soldiers Creek, he kept his truck between the yellow lines, but he still felt a part of himself floating down that skinny road through the trees and ending up at the creek. Everyone there would be high on life and the future, squeezing every last drop out of hazy afternoons and wild nights before walking into the rest of their lives come fall. He wanted to be there with them, but he also didn’t. The part of him that wanted more was glad he had a reason to skip the creek.

Tyler had learned long ago it wasn’t cool to be too smart. The kids who loved to read, the ones who got the good grades without having to study, the ones the teachers smiled down on—those were the kids who got bullied, who found crude notes in their lockers, who were laughed at in the cafeteria. Tyler never wanted to be one of those kids, so he downplayed his grades, hid his stash of novels in a box in the garage, and learned to leave the classroom quickly after the bell so no teacher could stop him and talk about his latest A.

But the real truth was, Tyler loved learning. He loved to read. He could write a killer essay in the time it took most people to find their way to the library. He even enjoyed solving a good, hard algebra problem. He knew it was grounds for quick dismissal from the crowd he usually spent his Friday and Saturday nights with during the school year, but he couldn’t help himself. He hated to say it, but most of those guys were dumb. They had his back on the football field and would defend him to the death, but ask them about Einstein’s theory of relativity or, heck, even the laws of gravity, and they’d mumble something incoherent, then run off to their trucks and their girls and their coolers of beer in the back. Nothing wrong with that, but Tyler was tired of it all.