Eve’s eyes were still lowered, her face turned slightly away. I figured maybe I should take a page from JoJo and Rocky’s book.

“Hey,” I said to her. “You okay?”

Her eyes were watering. “It’s nothing.”

“Fingernails?”

She nodded, maybe because she knew she’d start crying if she spoke.

“Can I clean it for you?” I asked.

She firmed her trembling lips. Then she turned her face fully to me for the first time. Her brown eyes held tiny flecks of yellow. “My mom,” she said. And that was all she could get out.

I took some Neosporin from one of the first-aid kits on the bleachers and put it on a soft gauze pad. I rested one hand on her warm cheek, and she closed her eyes. When the pad dabbed her cuts, she flinched, squeezing the wrist of my hand on her cheek. I didn’t pause, and she didn’t stop me. Cassius walked over and nudged her, and she lowered her other hand. He licked her palm. Once I’d finished, Eve took a shuddering breath and opened her eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

We were interrupted by a loud rapping sound. We turned to see Alex tapping the dry-erase board with her hockey stick to get everyone’s attention. Patrick was up front with her, Dr. Chatterjee to the side. The gym fell silent.

Britney stood beside Alex, her face red from crying. They were holding hands, but now Alex let go and stepped in front of the board.

“Okay, guys,” Alex said. “Let’s talk about where we are with everything. Have you tried a phone?”

“Of course we tried a phone,” Ben Braaten said. He wasn’t as tall as Patrick, but he was thicker, with beefy biceps and big square wrists. His flannel shirt tugged up in the front, snared around something shoved in the waistband of his jeans. As he swaggered closer, I saw that it was a bolt gun used to stun cattle before the kill. It made sense, since his dad worked at a slaughterhouse. An image from earlier came to me—Don Braaten in his bloodstained overalls, pinning Janie Woodrow to the road.

Cassius gave a low growl, and a moment later Ben breezed by me, bumping my shoulder. He ran a hand over his bristling crew cut. The rippled flesh from a skin graft at his hairline never ceased to fascinate me, not because it was ugly—it wasn’t—but because it always looked to me like some otherworldly mark. When his drunken older brothers had crashed the Camaro, Ben alone had emerged from the fiery hull, and the scar on his forehead seemed like the thumbprint of an angel or a devil branded into his flesh, marking him to survive.