“I know it must have been hard on you,” Amber says. “According to your file, you started acting out shortly after your dad passed.”

Dawn feels it like sandpaper on her nerves. Rubbing grit into her, making her squirm. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says again. Tries to shut down, go flat and numb and lifeless.

“I know you’re not a bad kid, Dawn,” Amber says. “Your mom says in your file that you’re smart and creative and kind, and hey, I can sense that just spending time around you. I’d love to help you get back to that person we both know you are, if you’d let me.”

Dawn thinks that Amber doesn’t know anything about her, that she’s full of shit, that she’s not qualified to say anything about how Dawn should lead her life just because she read a freaking file.

But she also wants to believe Amber. She wants to believe there’s a way out of this that doesn’t involve screaming fits with your mom and sex with drug dealers. She wants to believe life is going to get better.

What she doesn’t want to do is have to talk about her dad. Not now or ever. Not to Amber or anyone else. She doesn’t want to think about him, period.

She just can’t.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she tells Amber again. And this time Amber seems to actually hear her.

“That’s okay,” the counselor says. She smiles at Dawn brightly and touches her shoulder. “Another time, maybe,” she says.

I doubt it, Dawn thinks, but she doesn’t say anything. She just quickens her pace and tries to catch up with Lucas and Kyla.

And leaves Amber in her dust.

Chapter 20

A WEEK PASSES. Dawn spends it mostly with Lucas. She avoids Amber and really avoids Christian. She figures out, mostly, how to set up her tarp. She eats more rice and lentils than she ever thought possible, and still it doesn’t feel like enough.

She goes to bed hungry.

Her pants start to feel noticeably looser.

A week passes.

At the end of the week, the Out of the Wild Bear Pack staggers back into headquarters, and there’s a new recruit waiting for them, spiffed out in bright-yellow “Bear Club” gear. He’s standing outside the headquarters buildings with the guy who brought Dawn from the airport, Steve. He watches the group stagger in from the woods and his eyes just get wider and wider.

“Hey, group,” Steve says when the Pack reaches the buildings. “Meet Alex.”

Alex is from Spokane. He’s tall and looks fit and Dawn thinks he should be okay in the woods. But he’s looking at the Pack like they’re a horde of zombies. Or, like, prisoners in some wartime camp.