I didn’t want to think about Elise and her father. She’d been texting me throughout the night but I hadn’t had a chance to get back to her.

I couldn’t avoid her forever, though. After dinner, Evan pulled me aside when Jack was helping clear the table. “Hey, Remy, Elise is really worried. Are you avoiding her?”

“No,” I said, surprised she’d talked to Evan about me. “What’d she say?”

“Not much, just that she hasn’t seen you in over a week.”

“Oh. I guess I’ve been busy,” I said. “I’ll talk to her, sorry.”

I called her when I got home and she picked up on the first ring.

“Remy?” Her voice sounded so heartbreakingly hopeful.

“Hey,” I said, wracked with guilt. It wasn’t like I was actively ignoring her. I always texted her back, just not right away. We saw each other a week ago, on the last day of school, but I hadn’t seen her since, and it was the longest stretch we’d gone without seeing each other since we met. I used to spend all my time with her—I used to want to spend all my time with her, but I hadn’t wanted to hear her complain about how I was ditching her for Jack anymore.

“Are you home?” she asked. “I’ll pick you up. Let’s go for a drive.”

42.

We drove around in silence for a while, cigarettes in hand, with the top down. It unnerved me, how quiet she was.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer. I used to pick up all her calls right away and respond to her texts as soon as I saw them. And now I let her calls go to voicemail and forgot to text her back half the time. I used to spend every free minute with her, and even though it was summer now, I hadn’t seen her since the end of school.

I knew she thought it was all Jack’s fault, but it was more than just him. It was hard to admit, but part of me started pulling away from her the night she told me about her father, showed me that bruise on her shoulder. It was hard to accept that I was simply afraid—afraid of what I didn’t understand, afraid of Elise, afraid for Elise. Afraid of her father. Afraid of the Deadly Vipers and what they were up to, afraid of her endless well of anger.

The day after the Vipers took Mr. Voss down, she told me the reason they went after him was because he’d known Dawkins was a creep but did nothing about it, or worse, tried to cover it up.

“How do you know?” I’d asked.

“Come on.” She leveled a look at me. “He had to have known.” Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t.

“But—” I began to protest.

“God, you sound just like Madi. Okay, we broke into his office, forced the locks on his filing cabinets to find the personnel folders. We had proof. It was in Dawkins’s file. He’d been let off with warnings in the past. Voss knew and just let him off the hook.”