Dawn rolls her eyes. “What about a flashlight?” she asks, because Amber is leaving and taking the flashlight with her, leaving Dawn to tough it out with the tarp in the dark. “Can I have a little light, at least?”

Christian laughs again, from somewhere in the dark. “Gotta earn that, too,” he says, and then he and Amber are gone, and Dawn’s feeling around for her tarp like a blind person, wondering how she’s supposed to earn anything if they won’t let her see the way.

Dawn struggles with her tarp and it’s shitty and frustrating. She gets dirt all over her sleeping bag and the rest of her stuff, and she scratches her hands and her arms feeling around for bigger rocks in the bushes to hold the tarp down. It’s almost completely dark now, and she can hear Christian and Amber telling the rest of the Pack it’s time for lights-out. Dawn can’t find any big rocks, and her tarp’s flapping all over the place—

(and she’s just about to give up and sleep out in the open and hope Amber doesn’t notice and it doesn’t rain in the night)

—when something rustles beside her

and Dawn nearly screams in terror, thinking it’s a cougar—or worse, Christian—but then that something whispers her name and tells her to be quiet and it’s actually Lucas, and he holds his flashlight up to his face and gives her a goofy grin so that she knows it’s him.

“I thought you could maybe use a little help with that tarp,” Lucas says.

Chapter 13

“I DIDN’T ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING WRONG,” Lucas tells Dawn as he helps her retrieve her tarp from the tangle of bushes where it’s been blown by the wind. “My dad signed me up for this because he thought it would be good practice for the army.”

Dawn stares at him, squinting in the glare of his flashlight. “Wait, what? You don’t, like, have to be here?”

“Oh, I have to be here,” Lucas says, laughing. “You never met my dad. He didn’t exactly give me a choice.”

“Yeah, but.” Dawn looks back toward the ring of tents, barely visible in the flickering firelight. “You’re not here because you’re bad, or whatever. You’re not, like, a criminal.”

Lucas laughs again. “Are you?”

Dawn hesitates. She’s not technically a criminal; at least, she’s never been arrested. But she’s not really a LAW-ABIDING CITIZEN, either. She doesn’t want to make any confessions to Lucas, not now that she’s heard his story.

Lucas reads her nonanswer for the answer it really is, though. “You don’t have to be ashamed or anything,” he tells Dawn. “We’re freaking teenagers. Nobody’s perfect.”