The car ride is chatty, because my dad is chatty, and we end up talking about everything from my uncle getting a root canal to the neighbors starting to put up Christmas decorations in October. He asks, again, about the food, and about the Rumson boys, and what friends I’ve made, and if I’ve broken any of my winning records at cards yet, and what classes I’m enjoying, and by the time we pull into the driveway of our small white colonial, he’s whistling like things are totally normal and he didn’t just pick me up from boarding school because I fell out a window.

Not once has Sierra’s name come up.

It’s strange how quickly a place you’ve called home can feel so alien, but from the minute we enter through the familiar red front door, everything feels wrong. If you don’t know that the Riley house is supposed to sound like blaring music and incessant telephone chatter and have the smell of three different perfume samples sprayed onto one little wrist, then maybe it seems normal. And if you haven’t spent weeks getting used to being in a dorm with twenty-two boys who are always shouting, smell like BO, and constantly drip on the floors so that every walk down the hallways is an adventure, then maybe this could even seem like a lovely place to live.

But right now, it isn’t my home, and it doesn’t feel like the place I grew up in, and the silence is thick enough to choke on.

“Your room’s just as you left it,” Dad says quietly, as if trying to match the tone of the house. “Mom will be home in a couple of hours. You want something to eat?”

“No, thanks. I’m just gonna go lie down.”

“Okay. You go do that and I’ll bring you an ice pack.”

He helps me get set up on the living room couch with a pile of pillows under my ankle and the ice pack bound to it, and then heads out to make a work call while I turn on the TV, hoping to drown out all the noise in my head. I keep glancing at my phone, even though everyone I know is in class right now, and contemplate telling Claire I’m here to see if she’ll come over after school, but decide our makeup is still too new and tenuous to rush into that.

Instead, I watch old poker championships until I fall asleep.

When I wake up, it’s to the buzzing of my phone under my arm. I wipe the puddle of drool off my face and the inside of my elbow and squint at the screen.

Salem

Have you managed to go the whole afternoon without further injuring yourself?

I can’t help it; I can feel my lips tugging into a smile at the sight of his name.