I run upstairs so I don’t have to say another single thing to another person. I throw myself on the bed. It’s so soft. I hate it. I mean, I hate that I like it. There are so many things I should have told Melissa. So far she only knows Mom as the woman who lets her daughter drive a pickup truck in the snow in the middle of the night and doesn’t make her go to school, but does make her sing in front of strangers. There’s so much more, though! Like when I was ten and dying to see the Country Music Awards. We were camping just outside Oklahoma City and didn’t have a TV. But she made friends with the family in the fancy RV next door, and we got to watch the show on their plasma screen. We sat on their couch in that RV and analyzed Carrie Underwood’s new guitar and Kacey Musgraves’s orange pantsuit. We watched all the way until the end. I’d never been so tired and happy in my life.

I sigh and roll over, catching sight of Mom’s guitar by the door. It’s like having a piece of her here, which is great, but not enough. It’s not nearly enough. Why did she send me here?

There’s a knock, and Ginger peeks her head in. “Dan has tennis with the team this afternoon. Want to go for a walk?”

“Uh, sure.” I really don’t, but it’s either that or stare at the guitar.

We leave Dan on the bottom step pulling on his very white tennis shoes and head into the late September sunshine. They live on a quiet street that backs up to a thicket of trees. At its edge there is a little wooden gate, like the kind you’d find in The Secret Garden. Ginger leads me through it. We leave the sunshine behind and wind our way under a canopy of maples and pines. It’s quiet as we walk, just the crunch crunch of red and yellow leaves under our shoes. It’s funny the sounds my body finds calming and the ones it doesn’t. What glitch in my brain decided crunchy leaves are good and blenders and airplanes are bad?

“I like it here, away from the sound of traffic and people,” Ginger says like she’s reading my mind. After a few minutes we stop at a footbridge that runs over a little creek. She leans on the railing and rubs her head like it hurts and then lets down her ponytail.

I ask the question that I’ve been wondering about since Melissa left. “How’d you know that stuff about California law?”