Before she left for work, Mom gave Penn a twenty-dollar bill and three ones to reimburse him for the groceries, and she gave me a ten for gas. So on my way to school, I stop at the cheapest gas station in town and ask the clerk to put ten dollars on pump number two. I can tell from the creepy way his gaze stays glued to me that he knows who I am. It takes every bit of self-control I have to keep from shouting at him that I am not a baby killer while I spend the last of my babysitting money on two hot chocolates from the machine next to the hot dog rotisserie.

I hope he isn’t one of the Twitter psychos.

I hope he doesn’t keep a gun under the counter.

Ten minutes later, I carry both steaming cups of gas station cocoa into the math and science hall at school, where I find Amira at her locker.

“What’s this for?” she asks as she accepts one of the hot chocolates.

“It’s an outright bribe. If you drink it, you have to help,” I add as she takes the first sip.

Amira laughs. “I feel like you should have mentioned that part first.” She sets the cup on the floor of her locker and lifts a textbook over it. “What have I gotten myself into, exactly? Fair warning: I’m not breaking into anyone’s car.”

“You heard about that?” I take a sip from my own cup.

“Everyone heard about that.”

“Great.” At this point, setting the school on fire might actually improve my reputation. “But this is nothing illegal. I could just really use some moral support.”

Amira reclaims her cup and closes her locker. “What’s going on, Beckett?”

I turn toward our first class. In a school this size, there are only enough kids for one section of most AP classes, so all the “smart” juniors have most of our classes together, all day long. Starting with first period AP English Lang.

I’m relieved when she falls into step with me, because as hard as it is to walk through the school knowing that all the stares and whispers are about me, it’s even harder to walk the gauntlet alone.

“I just found out that if no one claims Lullaby Doe’s body, the county is going to have her cremated and buried in an unmarked hole in the ground.”

“That’s horrible!”

“Yeah. I think I know how we can do better than that for her, but I’ll have to get the Key Club involved, and coming from me …” I shrug. “I mean, I’m pretty sure our school doesn’t have a varsity firing squad, but I don’t want to be the reason they start one.”