I pulled back the cover carefully, almost wincing against what I might find. Junie’s presence enveloped me as I read her words, saw the doodles she’d drawn on the edges of the pages. I hoped she didn’t mind, my snooping into her private world. I took my time, running my fingers over places where her pen had dug into the paper, smiling at quick notes she’d jotted complaining about a school assignment or lamenting my inability to cook. Had a fight w/ Izzy, but we’re good now, adorned the top of one page, followed by a heart. There was no mention of boys or drugs or sneaking out. Nothing that set my alarm bells ringing. Nothing until the final pages. Where in a bottom corner, writing cramped like she was fighting to get the words out, Junie wrote: Worried about Izzy. I told her he’s too old. But she’s not listening. To anyone. She says it’s love, but it’s really only lust. Gross. Just thinking about it makes me sick. I wish she would wake up. She’d written the word up with such force that her pen had torn through the paper.

My breath gusted out of me. Here was something I could grab onto. A place to start, at least. Which was more than I’d had an hour ago. The day opened up in front of me. A reason to stand up and move. A reason to keep going.

EIGHT

Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School was twelve miles outside of town, down a winding road off the highway that hid it from view. It served the kids of the entire spread-out county, some riding the bus more than an hour each way to sit in an old, drafty building without enough teachers or anywhere near enough funds. They’d renamed the school a few years ago in a nod to diversity. When I’d attended, the county had been virtually all white. But nowadays, with the chicken-processing plant perched on the edge of the county line, the kids of immigrants roamed the halls, their parents taking jobs no locals would touch, even when other steady employment was almost impossible to come by. I’d listened to plenty of bitching about the name change while serving coffee in the diner, endless complaints about political correctness or, as one old-timer put it, “this bullshit idea that everybody’s got to be equal.” People around here didn’t like being force-fed progress, even when it could be argued that a mouthful was long overdue. I somehow doubted the name change did much to alter the reality for those kids, who were always going to be outsiders. Junie had hated the place, couldn’t wait to start high school in another year. I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that Harry S. Truman High School wasn’t much better, maybe even worse. Too many kids without a lot of hope for the future crowded into an even smaller space. From my graduating class, only a handful of kids had gone on to college. And of those, the majority had come back to Barren Springs without a degree. It’s hard to move up in the world when you’ve never seen it done.