“You’re a terrible liar, Lily Louten. I think you do.” He pressed the pads of his fingers into my leg, and I knew it would be the easier thing to do, to give in. But if I slept with Matthew, it would be my worst fall yet. I didn’t need to seek out ways to make Clara’s prophecy come true, the way I had with Luke and Rob. Opportunities to debase myself—to make my personality, my desires, subordinate to someone else’s—were all too easy to come by. What I needed to do was protect myself. To remember who I was at my core.

“It doesn’t matter whether I want to. It matters that I won’t.”

“Have it your way. I think that waitress over there likes me anyway.”

“She’s paid to like you, Matthew.” But he wasn’t listening anymore. He had reached into the hibiscus plant next to him and picked a hot pink bloom, and was twirling it in his fingers. As soon as I left I knew he would walk over and slide it behind some woman’s ear and tell her, in a voice saccharine with liquor, how beautiful she was.

CLARA

I SAW THOSE WOMEN EVERY time I closed my eyes. Anytime I left the apartment, I felt overwhelmed by my senses. The blare of a car horn from a block away. The bang of a garbage collector emptying a metal trash can into the yawning mouth of his truck. Every man whose stare lingered a little too long. Every person who stepped a little too close.

I walked through the bus terminal, though in the past I tried to avoid it. At night it could be dangerous, and even during the day it gave me the creeps. Everyone there seemed damaged or deranged. People who heard voices in the silence. Men with palsied hands. Women with shopping carts full of trash and rags and muddy plastic bags. The air-conditioning was cranked all the way and it made the hairs on my arms stand up. I approached the window and asked how much a ticket to California would cost.

The woman chewed a wad of bright green gum and stared past me for so long I wondered if she forgot I was there. “Well that depends,” she said finally. “Where are you trying to go?”

“Los Angeles,” I said.

She clicked her mouse a few times and shook her head. “It’ll take three days, with a four-hour stop in Topeka, Kansas.”

“That’s okay. How much?”

“Two hundred and seventy-eight dollars. Plus tax.”

“I only have two hundred on me right now.”

“Well, you’ve got two hours before the bus leaves.”