Which was how, two months later, Clare was eventually able to drive around their block. By the time summer came, and after the one-year anniversary of that night, Clare was able to make her first short trip, alone, to the store. She had spent the whole summer taking care of small errands for her mother, her mother who was on a mission to help Clare recover, move on—get her life back. So by the fall, Clare could drive again. Short distances only, and she never enjoyed driving. It had now become a necessary evil to be endured, but she could do it. Even if she hadn’t really moved on in any other way.

She was nineteen now. She wasn’t working or in school and didn’t really see a path toward either of those options. Waiting her turn in the checkout line, Clare read the red-and-white Help Wanted sign taped to the wall beneath the customer service desk where they sold lottery tickets and scratchers. There was small, handwritten print, probably detailing exactly what sort of job they were hiring for, in the white space at the bottom of the sign, but it was too far away for Clare to make out.

She inhaled, gathering herself for what she knew she needed to do next. Her mother hadn’t mentioned her getting a job, not once, since the accident. But she couldn’t spend her every day floating from her bedroom to the kitchen to the bathroom, occupying herself with little more than the words she scribbled down in her journals and daytime soap operas. It was time. She needed to keep moving on with her life, even if that life wore a red smock and a name tag. After she paid for her doughnuts, she would head over to the counter and ask for an application.

Clare felt a tap on her shoulder and jumped. When she turned, she saw Mrs. Cummings standing right behind her. She had pushed to the front of her overflowing grocery cart in order to get closer to Clare.

“It’s a shame what almost happened to you,” Mrs. Cummings began with a breathless urgency.

Clare stared blankly back at Mrs. Cummings, her face made strange by a heavy hand of makeup that left her eyes ringed with a mix of dark brown and blue, her bouncing cropped perm hacked like a hedge that ended right at her dimpled chin.

“That boy, drinking like that, putting your life at risk. It’s simply a miracle you weren’t killed as well.”

Clare got the impression that this woman had been waiting for exactly a moment like this to express herself on the topic of Adam Collins and the shocking thing that had happened last year.