Charlie and Natasha both looked frightened. No one had seen Fiona completely lose control like this before. She had been their rock through their parents’ deaths and the arrival of Mrs. Weatherspoon and the move to Pine Island and discovering the death of their great-aunt. Without her as the rock, their lives suddenly felt very shaky indeed.

Marlin settled Natasha and Charlie on the couch with a box of crackers and got on the bike, pedaling as fast as she could to the school. But by the time she got there, there was no one in front of the school or even arriving for the dance anymore. She made her way through the school’s front door and to the gym.

“Wait a second, dear, what are you doing here?” asked one of the teachers who was sitting in a chair outside the gym doors. “I don’t seem to recognize you.”

“No, I’m Fiona McCready’s sister. I just have to find this boy, Davy Clement,” she said. “My sister was supposed to meet him but now she can’t come.”

“Okay, dear, let’s go see if someone knows where he is,” said the teacher, and the two of them went into the dark gym. But the teacher who knew who Davy Clement was couldn’t spot him and after asking around they finally found a girl who said he had been outside the front door for a while and finally left.

“Did he go home?” Marlin tried to shout over the din of the music and talking.

“Dunno,” the girl answered, shrugging. “But I haven’t seen him in the gym.”

“Okay, thanks,” Marlin mouthed to both the girl and the teacher, and left.

By the time Marlin had biked home, Fiona had calmed down and was sitting on the couch with Charlie and Natasha looking all blotchy with puffy eyes from crying.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t bike to the gym yourself,” said Marlin. “You look like Miss Piggy.”

“Thanks,” said Fiona. “What did he say?”

“He wasn’t there, Fi,” said Marlin. “Someone saw him waiting out front for a while and then he left. Can’t you call him?”

“No, he doesn’t have his own phone and he doesn’t want his family to know about us. I don’t even have his family’s phone number. He probably hates me now anyway.”

“You can’t explain on Monday either because school’s out,” pointed out Natasha.

“Thanks for belaboring the obvious, Nat,” said Marlin.

“Oh, leave her alone,” said Fiona wearily. “Nothing good ever happens to this family anyway. I shouldn’t have expected it.”

This shocked the sisters, coming from relentlessly positive Fiona.

“Some good things happen,” said Charlie. “Marlin is getting her book published.”

Marlin looked at the floor. “Yeah, maybe,” she muttered.

“Never mind, pass the crackers,” said Fiona, and shoved a handful of them mindlessly into her mouth. She’d been too excited to do more than pick at dinner and now suddenly she was ravenous. “What’s on television?”

“You choose,” said Marlin.

So Fiona flipped channels until she found something she could sit through but she couldn’t pay attention to the show. Her mind scurried like a rat in a wheel trying to think how she could possibly explain to Davy, if she ever saw him again, why she had stood him up. She couldn’t tell him her guardian had been passed out drunk. And anything else she could think of sounded so fake and feeble. She didn’t want to think about it. She would just add it to the long list of things she never wanted to think about.