She laughs sourly. “English 105: Composition and Rhetoric? Come on, Matty! You write papers in your sleep, you’ve never prepared for a speech in your life, and you still get As. Bio 103: Intro to Plants of the Piedmont? Your mother was a botanist! I didn’t say anything about it before, but now it makes sense. You signed up for slacker classes, you barely paid attention to the campus tour, and now you’re getting us into trouble. You’re just screwing around here, aren’t you?”

Shame rises up inside my belly. Shame, and not a small amount of embarrassment. I didn’t think I’d picked slacker classes. Maybe they wouldn’t be as hard as others I could have chosen, but just being here at all is already hard. Keeping the wall up, keeping After-Bree hidden, and now magic. Anger chases right behind the shame, burning it away in a fiery rush. Alice doesn’t even know about After-Bree. Alice doesn’t know about any of it!

“You didn’t have to go to the Quarry,” I spit. “You could have said no.”

She groans. “You’ve been acting like this all summer. Like nothing matters. I couldn’t let you go off alone with Charlotte Simpson!”

“So, what, you’re my babysitter now too?”

“After last night, it’s pretty clear you need one! If you—” She stops herself and looks away, her jaw clenched tight around words she’s holding back.

I spread my hands wide. “Say what you want to say, Alice.”

She turns away. “We applied when your mom was still… I know things aren’t the same for you. I’m trying to understand, but if you don’t want to be here, if you’re not going to take this seriously, then maybe you should go home.”

It’s like she slapped me clean across the face. Hot tears press against the back of my eyes. “Go home? Home to what, exactly? Go back to being the Girl Whose Mom Died in that small, gossipy town?” Carolina had been our dream.

She stares back, and I can see it in her eyes: sometime in the last twenty-four hours she’d already imagined doing this alone. Without me.

The wall inside me grows. I let it stretch so tall and wide that I can’t see its top or its edges. The barrier slides into place so completely that all of the muscles in my face go still at once. I envision a surface that is flat and impenetrable, and I feel my eyes become flat and impenetrable too. “My turn. How ’bout you grow up and get a life instead of blaming me for your choices?”

Alice steps back, and the crack in her voice goes straight to my heart. “I don’t know who you are right now, Bree.” She stares at me for a moment longer and then bends to gather her things. I can’t move, or speak.