Win Purity Pledge, huh. Weird thinking of it that way. I said, “How?”

Jameer lifted the flap on his satchel, produced a brand-spanking-new Bible. “That’s yours. No more borrowing. I’ll help you read up on appropriate scriptures ahead of time. You’ll use them to be proactive. After tonight, you’re the first to answer at least two of Sister Vanessa’s questions each session. Got it? Should be enough to get you started. Don’t look at me like that.”

Were my teeth showing? Was I snarling? “Like I don’t have enough homework already. I’m taking a lot on faith here.”

He swept a hand toward the church doors. “Great place for it. Have I led you wrong yet?”

“You haven’t led me anywhere.”

“Yet!”

Mya pulled up in her beat-down Subaru, a car as old as us, that had, on more than one occasion, required me, or Tyrell, or Stu the Cook to break out some jumper cables and resurrect her finicky battery in the FISHto’s lot after a shift. It was pine-forest green in the places where the paint wasn’t splotchy and worn down to the gray chassis. A neat row of GCHS Honor Roll Student bumper magnets decorated the back end, and the odor from the exhaust pipe was of environmentally unfriendly scorched oil. She parked beside me, shouldered open her dented door, and emerged looking distraught. Her phone—a modern Android, not a throwback like Jameer’s—was in her hand. She looked at it, to the church doors, back to her phone, frowned. Like she was double-checking the GPS coordinates of somewhere she did not want to be.

She spotted me and Jameer, came over. My immediate thought: What’d I do now?

But this wasn’t about me. Not even close.

“Hey guys,” she began, still flicking glances at the church doors. “Is Kiera here yet?”

“She’s inside,” Jameer said. “You know her. Early is on time, on time is late.”

Another odd glance. “Is she okay?”

Jameer stiffened. I leaned toward Mya like I was having trouble hearing her. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

“I don’t like spreading gossip.”

Video was playing on her phone, obvious flickering movements. I pried it from her hand. “I will relieve you of the burden, Mya.”

She didn’t resist. This was something we’d end up seeing with or without her help. Which kind of made it worse.

It was an IG story from one of our classmates. Blond, freckle-faced Taylor Burkin, who dressed up like Scarlett Johansson’s Major character from Ghost in the Shell last Halloween and immediately got sent home because Vice Principal Terrier wasn’t having any sexy skin-tight suits in his hallways, thank you very much. That outfit didn’t fit her very long because she was also one of the Baby-Getters. Like the rest of them, she’d had her kid over the summer. Taylor had yet to return to school, but she had a pointed message for her GCHS classmates.

“You know what,” she said, staring down at the camera, the puppy filter on so she had a dog’s nose and ears for some reason, “I see all of y’all talking a bunch of mess about me and the other Green Creek ladies who have kids now. ‘The Baby-Getters this’ and ‘The Baby-Getters that’—everybody got an opinion, huh? Well, I got opinions, too.”