He’d waited on the front steps for hours, scanning the horizon for any sign of Maria and Lily, until it was too dark to see anything. Then he’d kept waiting after that. When it was two minutes until lights-out and everyone else was filing inside, he’d stayed where he was, sending Maria text after text. Then Tony, the campus security guard, came over. All it took was one stern look before Brandon was walking inside after everybody else.

Thinking about his two strikes. Thinking about getting in trouble with his dad.

He should’ve said to hell with all that. He should’ve snuck off campus and gone looking for them. He could’ve found them before they—

Before they what, exactly? Where the hell had Maria and Delilah gone? And if they’d gone out together, how had Delilah wound up jumping out a window and Maria wound up sitting miserably in the common room?

There must’ve been something he could’ve done tonight. Before tonight, even.

He could’ve been nicer to Delilah. He could’ve tried to help her before she moved on from oxy to acid to whatever else if she hadn’t jumped out that window and gotten caught.

Of course, she would’ve gotten caught even if she hadn’t jumped out the window. Tomorrow was the surprise drug test. Brandon had spent the afternoon working in the athletics office, pretending to laugh at the assistant coaches’ dirty jokes while he printed out the consent forms and set up the equipment for the testing company.

Had Delilah known about the test somehow? Lily and Maria had promised not to tell anyone, but what if they had? Was Delilah sending out a cry for help, like they’d been warned about in eighth-grade health class?

Or maybe it wasn’t really about the drugs. Maybe the drugs had just given Delilah permission to do something she’d wanted to do anyway.

If that was it, well . . . Brandon could understand that.

Middle school had been awful. In seventh grade, every day when he woke up—when he realized it was another day, that he’d have to see those kids again, put his head down and pretend he couldn’t hear them again, put every bit of energy he had into not crying again—it felt like a weight on his chest that only got heavier every time. Seventh grade was when his panic attacks started getting worse. That only gave the people at school another reason to laugh at him.

There was a big church in his hometown that had a bell tower. His mom used to drive by it on their way to the Walmart. Sometimes Brandon would look up at that tower and wonder what it would feel like. Maybe it would feel like freedom. Anything would feel freer than having to face school every single day.