Although she’d only walked a block from her home, her T-shirt was already sticking to her skin, so she unzipped her puffy pink jacket. Her lavender corduroys were a size twelve chubbo, but they were still too tight. Her cousin Trinity was a size eight slim, but just Riley’s bones without any skin were bigger than a size eight slim. She switched her heavy backpack to her other arm. Her load would have been a lot lighter if she’d left the scrapbook behind, but she couldn’t do it.

The houses on Riley’s street sat well back from the road, some behind gates, so there weren’t any sidewalks, but there were streetlights, and Riley dodged them as best she could. Not that anybody was going to come looking for her. Her legs started to itch, and she tried to scratch through the corduroy, but that only made the itching worse. By the time she saw Sal’s beat-up red car at the end of the next block, they were on fire.

He’d parked under a streetlight, like a moron, and he was smoking a cigarette in quick, jerky puffs. When he spotted her, he started looking around, like he thought the police might show up at any minute. “Gimme the money,” he said when she got to the car.

Riley didn’t like standing under the light where anybody driving by could see them, but arguing would take longer than giving him the money. Riley hated Sal. He worked on his dad’s landscape crew when he wasn’t in school, which was how Riley knew him, but that wasn’t why she hated him. She hated him because he rubbed himself when he didn’t think anybody was looking, and he spit, and he said nasty stuff. But he was sixteen, and ever since he got his license four months ago, Riley had been paying him to take her places. He was a crappy driver, but until Riley turned sixteen herself, she didn’t have a lot of choices.

She pulled the money out of the front pocket of her green backpack. “A hundred dollars now. I’ll give you the rest after we get to the farm.” She’d watched a lot of old movies, so she knew all about how you were supposed to divide up the money.

He looked like he wanted to grab her backpack, but it wouldn’t have done him any good, because she’d hidden the rest of the money in her sock. He counted the bills, which she thought was rude because she was standing right in front of him, and it was like calling her a big cheater. Finally, he stuffed the money in his jeans pocket. “If my old man finds out about this, he’s going to beat the shit out of me.”

“He’s not going to find out from me. You’re the only blabbermouth.”