“What?” He was thinking of home? He never mentioned home! It meant nothing to him. He’d written it off. “But—but—Aus—” She couldn’t think. She was out of breath and out of brain. What about summer? What good would summer be if Aus went home? What good would anything be? She had thought—she was sure—

“There’s only three more weeks of school, Aus,” she said. “You can’t go home now.” She did not want him to go home ever. She wanted his home to be here, not there.

He shrugged. “I can take finals at my old high school. They’d mail the tests and supervise me there.”

Macey had to make him stop walking, as if she didn’t matter. “Aus,” she said, “I’ve decided that what we need to do next is find the Beedons. The ones who took Mr. Sibley in. We know they lived in that red house on the hill above the baseball field. So let’s go to the town library after school, and from the 1959 city directory, we can find their full name and how to spell it and then—”

“Mace, I’m going to count myself out.” He shifted his books in front of him. “See you,” he said, walking on.

High schools did not have hideaways. There was no designated refuge. There was no corner in which you could vanish. You could not sign up to be tutored instead, sparing yourself twenty classmates.

The teacher was reviewing for a test, and Macey cared intensely about every test everywhere, but she had not known there was a test with Austin.

He still likes me, she told herself. She felt like a collection of body parts being flung around the room.

His grandfather came down on him. He had to back away from the research. He isn’t counting himself out for me.

You got a crush on that boy? That one named for Texas?

Her breathing came so short and quick that the act of taking in air was exhausting.

He’s your man, whether him and you want it or not. But Austin did not want.

It’s my fault, she thought. I dragged us into family-wrecking stuff, when I should have been thinking about him.

When school ended, Macey did not want to leave the building. She did not want to sit in an empty house for four hours before Mom and Dad got back. She certainly did not want to go to Nana and Papa’s and risk seeing Austin.

Oh, Austin! How could you want to go home?

If I hadn’t gone where Austin’s grandfather told me not to go, she thought, everything here would have stayed sunny and bright, and Aus would have wanted his summer plans more than his parents.

Macey had expected to be the summer plans.