He told me he was about to start his senior year in college, that he was from Illinois, passing through Barren Springs. On his way to somewhere better, I’d assumed. Chicago, he confirmed, where he had a summer internship. I don’t remember what I said in return. Some sterilized version of my own truth. I know I lied about my age, thinking that seventeen seemed too young to his twenty-one, might make him skittish and not likely to act on the spark I saw in his eyes. Not dumb enough to believe I’d ever see him again, but still wanting this moment, this night. This boy who didn’t belong here, a piece of something that was foreign and different and just for me. A boy who didn’t know my mama or my history. A boy who hadn’t already written my entire story the second he laid eyes on me.

When I got up to turn off the lights, I let him follow me. Welcomed his hand sneaking under my skirt as the diner plunged into semidarkness. Closed my eyes and pretended I had a different life when he kissed me, the taste of whipped cream on his tongue. With him I was simply a girl who liked a boy. I wasn’t Cal Taggert’s less-attractive sister. I didn’t have a fading bruise on my cheek from my mama’s backhand. I wasn’t destined to spend the rest of my life working in this diner, always poor and always hungry for something more, even if I lacked the drive to reach for it. For those few hours, I let go of myself, and I was someone new.

When he drove away, sometime after midnight, I had no expectation of ever seeing him again. I didn’t pine for him, or daydream about what might have been. I’d never been that girl, and one night with Zach hadn’t changed that. The real world beyond Barren Springs had swallowed him up, taillights fading into the dark, and I’d stayed behind. And that’s the way it was always going to be. I didn’t waste time wishing for a different ending, even after I held the positive pregnancy test in my hand.

But, of course, I did see him again. Six months later. I’d gotten a weekend job helping serve food at Jenny Sable’s wedding. Marrying some guy she met at college, apparently. Dropped out and decided to become a Mrs. instead of finishing her degree. Rumor was she had a bun in the oven already, but I didn’t pay much attention to the details. Just knew the reception was quite an event for Barren Springs. A buffet and passed hors d’oeuvres. Catered from the Blue Lantern, the only halfway-decent restaurant in a fifty-mile radius, and even then most everything came frozen and reheated in a microwave. A blustery, late-January day and 125 guests crammed into the old Elks Lodge on the edge of town. They’d tried to make it nice, hanging fairy lights and stuffing fake flowers into every dark corner, but the whole place still smelled like wet carpet and old cigarette smoke, the fake wood paneling slightly tacky to the touch. “Putting lipstick on a pig,” Louise said with a shake of her head when we arrived, both decked out in the matching cheap black dresses Jenny’s mom insisted we wear. Mine barely fit over my basketball stomach, and Jenny’s mom’s mouth pinched in disapproval when she saw me.