In any case, we were all accounted for with our individual sentences known, except for Kiera. I asked Jameer how the Westings were treating her. Because his parents were keeping such a tight leash on him, he had no clue.

“All the parents have been consistent on this,” Jameer said, “the Pledgers aren’t allowed to talk to each other. Everyone thinks everyone else is the bad influence.”

I barely saw her in the halls at school, and when I did, Mason Miles was always near.

That made it hard to concentrate in English, and in gym where I spent the most time around Mason. An angry flip-flopping of two questions. How you, Mason? Why you, Mason?

In the midst of my stint in purgatory, Cressie dropped a whole damn series of videos calling out Green Creek High for allowing the harassment of the Baby-Getters, not providing a curriculum that educated the students in safe sex practices, and essentially calling our whole town a puritanical pothole. If anything, I could thank my sister for taking half the burden of Mom’s wrath. I might’ve shamed her out of the church she’d grown accustomed to (sleeping in Sundays was the only bonus from all this), but Cressie made it so Mom had to answer questions about her daughter throwing dirt on the town’s name.

Qwan told me Cressie’s subscribers had jumped to like fifteen thousand, so I imagined Mom’s irritation was a price she’d been more than willing to pay.

With no other time away from my parents’ scowling and school, I found myself embracing FISHto’s. Really throwing myself into the shifts. I used to wish for the clock to speed up so I could leave the oblong Flounder Fingers and Cod Crisps behind. Not anymore. With no other distractions, little stuff became obsession. The straw dispenser could never be more than half empty. The condiment cubbies beneath the counter could not be in disarray. When I found out the shrimp fryer oil was a week overdue for a changing, I lost my shit, to the shock of my wary coworkers, who remembered I’d once wished for a grease fire to take the whole building down.

Tyrell took notice of my newfound initiative.

The night before Thanksgiving, he caught me dragging two trash liners through the back entrance before dinner rush, the plastic bins bopping against each other while I worked the heavy latch with my free hand.

“Del,” he said, lurking in the shadows like a serial killer. “What you doing?”

“Cleaning.”

He leaned over the bins, scrutinizing. “You hosed these down?”

“Yes. We’re expecting a crowd, right? Night before Thanksgiving, everyone’s cooking for tomorrow. I do something wrong?”

“Not at all. Feel like taking drive-thru?”

That froze me. Drive-thru was, like, running point. The quarterback. The captain’s chair. Qwan was still working here the last time I had a crack at it. During dinner rush, Tyrell often ran it himself because he was obsessed with wait times and didn’t want any backups.