But if I believed that, I also had to accept that Mom wasn’t responsible for her actions. And I just couldn’t do that.

“Miss Moore?” Dick Click asked, standing next to my desk. “Your Manifest Destiny paper? You were supposed to hand it in before class started.” Shit.

“I don’t have it. Well, I mean, I did it. I just don’t have it with me.”

He put his hands on his hips. “Serena, Serena. Tsk, tsk, tsk.” His pleasure in this moment radiated from him, everything from the white surrounding his little eyes to the nana-nana-nana swish of his hips. “And where might it be?”

I didn’t really have it anywhere; it had been on the computer Mom dropped. Completed well ahead of the due date, thanks to Mom’s constant chiding about priorities. Completed and forgotten and now gone.

“On my destroyed computer.”

A thin little smile infected his lips. “Miss Moore, the computer ate my homework is no more an excuse than the dog.”

“The computer didn’t eat my homework. It’s an inanimate object. It doesn’t eat anything.” A few of the students laughed at that.

“Then why, pray tell, don’t you have the completed assignment?”

Because, pray tell, “My computer was destroyed.”

“Destroyed, Miss Moore? Did your house catch fire?”

His sarcasm scrubbed at my raw patience. “No.”

“And did gang members bust in and riddle it with bullets as retribution for your having one of their members hauled in?”

I squinted at his mature jab at my Mini Mart attack. But this time the stifled giggles weren’t for me. How quickly they turn on you, I thought. It wasn’t like I’d claimed to have been ganked or anything. The Kismet Courier might have, but not me.

“No.”

“Then you will get an incomplete.”

“I can write another paper.” I could feel my voice rising, my throat squeezing with the hysteria of one who was not being heard and needed to shout. “I can have it to you tomorrow.”

“Miss Moore, this isn’t a paper that can be completed in one day.”

Yeah, right, I thought, but I knew pleading would get me further than honesty. “I’ve already done the research. I wrote it once. I can write it again.”

His tweed blazer jumped an inch off his shoulders as he gave an excessively sarcastic shrug. “On what? Your destroyed computer?” He waited a beat, then: “Incomplete. Now, I think you’ve taken up enough of our class time.” He returned to his desk to begin his sacred lecture.

I was all prepared to zone out and behave myself when the screeching chalk pierced through the drone of his voice, shooting me out of my thoughts. A sadistic grin played on his face as he talked about the decimation of the American natives. Did he really think destiny justified their treatment?