The counselor wrote a report that said I was obstructing the process. My teachers were asked to report it to the office immediately when I didn’t show up for class or if I took more than two minutes to use the bathroom.

Which meant no more kissing Hallie Carpenter when I was supposed to be taking history quizzes. That turned out to be a stupid worry, because Hallie didn’t want to kiss me anymore. She told me one day that we’d made out twenty times and she felt like if we did it again, it would actually mean something.

Apparently twenty-one was the magic number.

After that, I had to work at the edges of Mom’s schedule, find time when I could disappear into the woods or the back seat of a car. The people I went with didn’t care if we made out once or twenty-one times.

They barely cared if they knew my name.

I ran my hands over hips and under shirts and waited for excitement to take its rightful place. But all I felt was skin. I was trying to chase a feeling backward. I strained through each moment, hoping that if I worked hard enough, I could end up in that place where finding someone to kiss was enough.

A girl in the class above mine with a blunt black bob and a history of staring at me drove me out to the lake and threw me into the back of her Jeep with a pile of blankets. A half an hour in and a few items of clothing down, she flicked my hair with her breath as she laughed. “You’re so lucky you’re a girl slut. If you did this with guys, you’d be pregnant by now. Or worse.”

I sat up so fast I almost threw up. I got out of her car and walked the rim of the entire lake before I called Mom to pick me up.

I didn’t feel lucky.

“You’re depressed because you’re having random, meaningless . . . hookups,” Mom said an hour later as she paced around my tiny room. She looked mad, but I knew the anger was just something she’d slapped on over her guilt so she felt fully dressed.

Guilt was a naked feeling.

“I’m not depressed,” I said. I clicked open the metal tab on a can of Vernors. The ginger ale sizzled down my throat, coated my nervous stomach without shaving off the sharp edge. “And please, please don’t say hookups.”

I wanted to be better for her. But I kept getting out of the car at red lights. Walking through private property at dawn. Knocking on strangers’ doors in neighborhoods where people owned multiple guns and would have been happy for an excuse to take one out.

And then: suspension, grounding, screaming, apologies.

And then: California.