The younger Chase brothers pile onto the bus and Johnny heads straight toward the back, where a couple of boys are calling to him. Danny pauses at the top of the steps, his hands wrapped tightly around the straps of his backpack and his expression uncertain as he looks down the aisle.

Lance understands that look. It’s like he’s seeing himself—well, a shorter, blond version of himself, with freckles and really nice shoes—when he got on the bus one stop before.

The other kids don’t like Lance, and they don’t like Danny, either. That fact makes Lance lonely. Maybe Danny’s lonely, too.

“You can sit by me,” Lance says, before he can overthink it. Danny’s head jerks in his direction, and a pink blush flares behind his freckles.

“Okay. Thanks.” Danny ambles forward and drops onto the seat next to Lance. Their elbows touch when Danny leans forward and slides off his backpack. “Sorry,” he says, shooting Lance a look out of the corner of his eye.

“S’okay,” says Lance. He feels hot and itchy all over, the way he always does when he has to talk to someone who isn’t Mr. Dale or a teacher. He sees a pin on the pocket of Danny’s backpack, though, and blurts out, “You like The Team?” Their librarian, a young woman with purple hair, got the first set of the comics. Lance has had to read them in small doses, keeping them in his cubby in the classroom because he’s afraid to take them home.

Danny looks up, something sharp in his eyes. “Well, yeah,” he says, like it’s a stupid question, and then his voice softens and his eyelashes fall down to his cheeks. They’re dark gold, like autumn leaves turning.

“I got the new issue. Y’wanna see?” He pinches the zipper on the front pocket of his bag and looks at Lance again.

“Yeah!” Lance exclaims, wiping his sweaty hands on his knees. “Yeah, I want to see.”

The bus starts to pull away and Lance happens to glance up—a conditioned habit. He’s just in time to see Robbie Chase put on a battered straw cowboy hat and climb back into the truck.

Today.

“You got somebody you want to call?”

Lance looks up at the question, wondering how long he’s been staring at his shoes, far away in memory.

He’s sitting on a bench that’s bolted to the wall inside an otherwise empty cell on the third floor of the courthouse in Trace County—the same building that’s probably storing his original birth certificate, first driver’s license application, and who knows what else. When he left Nebraska at sixteen, he never intended to come back…but if he had, he would’ve pictured himself spending the night in the Moonlight Motel, not the jail.

The attendant, or whatever his title is, is probably ten years older than Lance. His hair is just beginning to thin at the temples and his uniform is too tight in the stomach and the arms.

“I get one phone call? Just like the movies?” Lance loops an arm around his knee.