And wasn’t it wonderful to be in a place where everyone was so accepted, everyone could be their own true selves.

Talk like this made Olive want to puke.

Olive’s father had warned her. He’d said an out-of-state couple had bought the land half mile down the road, filed a building permit. There had been surveyors and excavators out there. But she’d thought there would be more time. That they might not actually come. But now here they were in their shiny new truck with their shiny new clothes, watching a cement mixer pouring a foundation. It was really happening.

She dug her dirty nails into the rough bark of the tree, picked at a loose piece until it came off, then watched as it bounced off Mike’s head and fell down to the ground.

“Olive, if I’m late to school again, my dad’s gonna skin me.”

“So leave,” she said. Mike could be such a wuss. He was always chickening out on her, wriggling out of cool plans they’d made, because when push came to shove, Mike hated breaking rules. He hated getting in trouble and was one of those kids who would burst into tears when a teacher singled him out and yelled at him, despite the fact that he was now a high school freshman, not a baby middle schooler anymore. Sometimes it seemed like Mike was just begging to get his ass kicked, which happened all too often, especially since they’d started high school.

“Really,” she said now. “You should hurry up and get to school.” The truth was she didn’t want him here anyway. He didn’t know squat about holding still and blending in.

“Come with me,” he begged, this totally sad pleading look on his face, all big eyed and weird like a baby doll. To make it worse, Mike’s voice always rose at the slightest possibility of trouble, making him sound more like a five-year-old girl than a fourteen-year-old dude. “If you skip again, they’ll, like, send the truant officer after you or something.”

Olive chuffed out a disgusted laugh. There was no truant officer. If there had been, he would have been banging down her door weeks ago. She hadn’t exactly been a model student this year and had lost track of how many days she’d either left early or skipped altogether. She turned in some of her assignments, showed up for tests and usually did pretty well, despite not studying.

“Look,” she whispered down. “Either stay or go. I don’t really care. But if you stay, you gotta hold still and shut your face.”