“You can have it back when you—” I glance at the screen, and a sick feeling churns in my stomach. She’s on a third-party app that lets people who don’t have Twitter accounts read through someone’s feed.

Landry’s reading my @ replies. Post after post calling me everything from a #babykiller to a hell-bound whore. No wonder she looks like she’s ready to hide from the entire world.

“Why are you looking at this?” I swipe the screen closed. I wish I knew how to block it.

“Some of those assholes are threatening to kill you, Beckett.”

“Don’t curse.”

“You do.”

“I’m sixteen.”

“I’m not a little kid. And anyway, age is just a number.”

My long, slow exhalation reminds me way too much of our mother. “Yes. It’s a number that quantifies an accumulation of experience and wisdom. Besides, as you pointed out, people online are threatening to kill me, and that comes with a ‘get out of jail free’ card, for profanity.”

Mom seems to agree. She hasn’t told me to watch my mouth even once since the Crimson Cryer accused me of abandoning my dead baby on the locker room floor.

“You are still living the life of a normal eighth grader. So lay off the language.”

Landry rolls her eyes. “Fine. Some of those jerks are threatening to kill you.”

“Yes, but they’re all bark and no bite.”

“How do you know?”

“Mom’s monitoring the threats and reporting them to the FBI. There’s been nothing credible so far.”

“So far?”

“Nothing at all. And there won’t be.”

“Again, how do you know?”

“I know because it’s a lot easier to say something anonymously online than it is to follow through with it. That’s true for everything from pledging to call your congressman to threatening to kill innocent sixteen-year-olds you’ve never even met.” I give her a casual shrug and hope she’s buying it. “Fortunately, the American public is really lazy.”

She spins around to lean on her pillow, which is propped against the wall at the head of her bed. “Why does Mom think Penn is that baby’s father?”

Her swift subject change leaves me reeling for a second. “It’s not that she actually thinks that.” I sink onto the edge of Landry’s narrow bed and hand her phone back. “She’s trying to officially rule him out.”

“But why would she need to do that?”

Sometimes I forget how smart my sister is. When she’s in the kitchen, I swear she’s thirteen going on thirty. Large and in charge, and inspiringly confident. But now …

Thirteen has never looked so young.

“That wasn’t his bag,” she says. “The one in the picture. It can’t be, because he was carrying his bag today.”

“You saw the picture?”