Just a feeling, I said, moving his hand back down to where it had been.

I was happy with him, so much happier than I would have been with the helpful Mickelsons. In his dirty bathroom, he helped me disguise. I hacked my hair with his dull scissors. Strands floated down like feathers to the floor.

He bleached all my redness away. Stinging sensation on my scalp; soon my hair was whiter than bone, white as porcelain.

Speed: he kept a stash in a Wonder Bread bag. He sliced open the shiny pills he called black beauties. When the white powder was on my stomach, he snorted it up, let me lick his finger to taste the remains. This might be a cure, I thought, feeling a sudden startle that wasn’t fever but a kick-start. This might be a cure, I thought, one better than any dumbass doctor could prescribe. This might be a cure, hearing him say, You’re my kind of girl. I love runaways.

I kissed him for hours that night, thinking maybe it was meant to be. I’d met him so easily.

I guess you could say I picked Nicholas up. I went for it as soon as I saw him skating down and soaring off the skinny rail by the steps leading away from the library. A cop told him to get off public property, and Nicholas said, Fuck off.

He said it, he didn’t mumble under his breath.

Hey, I yelled out, and he came my way. His hair was spiky and black; his smile brattier than Dean’s. He hitched up the torn jeans falling off his hipbones. He smiled like he believed me when I told him I was training to be a nurse and could cure all his injuries.

On my second day, I noticed the Blue House.

I was sitting on his windowsill, reading in my borrowed books about tourniquets and iodine.

Nicholas lived in a neighborhood called Fairfield, which is about five miles from downtown. In the clear. It was a hidden-away neighborhood I’d never been to before, and I was surprised by it because it was even more run-down than the street where I lived with my dad. Here the houses were all slammed together on sideways streets. The tiny backyards were without apple trees or rosebushes, just discarded junk—a sagging couch, a deflated kiddie pool, mangled motorbikes, all brown and rotting and rainsoaked. It was obviously a neighborhood for derelicts, a place I should have felt I belonged.

And the house that caught my eye seemed to have a kind of dirty grandeur. It was the highest on the hill, shoved behind a smaller house. There was something almost human about it, hovering behind like the older brother, the bully, the lurking boy.