Sabrina screws up her face into an expression that narrows her cool gray eyes to slivers. “No. Yes. Maybe.” She exhales sharply. “Salem was coming here, and my parents are very big on things between us being even, so they said if they were paying for him to go to boarding school, they were going to make the same offer to me. The idea of boarding school had never even crossed my mind, but at that moment, the idea of getting the hell away from Molly just sounded so damn good. And I figured if Salem could handle it, so could I.”

“And what was Salem doing here? He didn’t actually tell me why he got kicked out of your old school. Though ‘weed and truancy’ were mentioned.”

“Oh, if only it were that basic. No, my brother is a fucking moron, who was not only smoking on school property, but in the principal’s office. Which he broke into. On a Saturday.”

“Yikes.”

“Yup. I don’t know if one of his loser friends dared him or what, but there’s really no apologizing your way back from that one. I don’t even know if you could buy your way back from that one, not that we have ‘buy your way out of a principal-embarrassing drug scandal’ money. And before you ask, no, we don’t have ‘send two kids to boarding school’ money, either. Camden was the only school that gave us enough financial aid, and that’s with the help from the grandma my parents absolutely hate to ask for help.”

“For what it’s worth, we don’t have boarding school money either.” It’s a fact that still makes my guilt about begging to come here sit like a stone in my belly. Camden’s generous financial aid was definitely a factor in it being the ultimate choice, but if I don’t maintain the terms of my academic scholarship, I’m definitely screwed. “But wow, that’s obnoxiously stupid, even for Salem.”

“I know, right?”

The microwave beeps, and I get to work putting the popcorn into a bowl while Sabrina flips through the channels to try to find something on Camden’s limited cable selection that doesn’t suck. “So what about you?” she calls as I do a final shake for the kernel remnants. “What brought you here?”

“Honestly, same kind of thing,” I admit as I join her on the couch and hold out the bowl. “As you, not Salem.” It’s both weird to open up and nice to feel like I’ve finally found someone I can share with. The hardest thing about Sierra and Craig wasn’t even that they broke my heart—it was easy enough from the outside to see that Craig wasn’t worth it—but that the only person in the world I trusted enough to share my feelings about it with wasn’t even on my side.