Sadie was with Emma, having successfully begged her to play a couple of songs during the last few minutes of tech day camp. Maddie hoped Sadie just really liked Emma’s music, but she’d gotten to know Sadie better than that. You could take the Pulse away from the girl, but you couldn’t so easily take away what the Pulse had done to her.

The thought of leaving in a couple of days, before she got the chance to wash off the stench of Pulse—worse than Danny’s old socks—saddened Maddie.

As did the thought of New York. And the realization that Danny didn’t feel the same.

“And there’s a zoo, right in the park. How bonkers is that?” he said.

“Pretty bonkers.”

“And Mom said there’s a rock climbing wall right in my school’s gym. And my room is bigger than yours.”

Maddie stopped walking. “I have a room?”

“Well, duh!”

A room. For her. Her mom was giving her a room even though she hadn’t asked for one—hadn’t wanted one. She felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach as she remembered something her mom had said during their fight about Danny’s socks. She’d questioned whether Maddie wanted to be a part of her life. It barely registered at the time because Maddie always thought it was the other way around. That the distance between her and her parents emanated from them. But did her focus on Danny exclude them? Did she focus on Danny to exclude them?

Suddenly she realized she’d done the same thing to Delia and Lucy when she first got to ValleyStart. If it hadn’t been for Delia asking her to go to the club and Lucy dragging her on to the dance floor, would the rest of it have happened? Picnicking on the floor of their dorm room, creating a killer app, showing the world what Pulse really was?

Guilt crept in at the edges. Consciously or not, she was starting to think that she played a role in what had become of her family.

Well, duh, indeed.

Maddie took Danny’s hand—that he let her proved how much he missed her—and they walked into town. Lucy had made a reservation at her favorite Thai place because, in her words, one, it killed it on the pad thai, and two, no one, especially not Ryan Thompson, was going to dictate what she would eat. Though she said she’d likely shy away from the soup, for reasons she hadn’t told Maddie but that Maddie was certain would only bolster the feeling she had that Lucy might be the strongest person she knew.

The article in Teen Vogue had been trending all day.