Her voice trails off as she walks out the door, and Mike’s eyes meet mine just before he follows her out. I force a smile and give him a thumbs-up, and he drums his fingers on the door jamb before scratching his hand through his hair again. He effectively ruins all the styling he did to it, and then he closes the door behind him.

Chapter 8

That night, my eyes pop wide open in the dark when a crash sounds in our kitchen. And another.

I grip my bedsheets.

And another.

In the dark, I roll out from under my covers and hit the floor, because I am home alone, at night, and I am being fucking robbed.

Someone outside of my room is tearing the entire place apart, and my eyes are frantically struggling to adjust to the dark to find something, anything, to defend myself with.

This is what you get for moving to the city! an unhelpful voice shouts in my head as I stand up, and my disoriented, panicked body spins around and around in the middle of my moonlit room. I’m searching for a baseball bat or a crowbar or anything except the mountain of pillows on my bed. Why the hell do I have so many pillows?!

When the heavy footsteps draw closer to my room, I’m standing there clutching a half-empty bottle of water in my hand. And when those footsteps grow too loud to ignore, I launch myself into the hallway screaming like some demon-possessed tiger-woman.

“AAAAAYYYAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

The water bottle flies from my hand and through the air, and Danica’s voice yells “WHAT THE FUCK!” as it whizzes past her head.

“Dani?”

“WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?”

Her eyes are even wider than mine, slicing back and forth between me and where my water bottle shattered one of our living room table lamps into a million tiny pieces.

“I thought . . . I thought you were a robber . . .”

“So you threw a water bottle at me?!” When I just stand there like an idiot, she yells, “Did you even call the cops before you tried to murder me?”

That probably would’ve been the smart thing to do, so . . . “No . . .”

Instead, I sprung into the hallway like a five-foot-tall, Aquafina-sponsored assassin, complete with heart-print pajama pants and a puppy face printed on my T-shirt. I push my wild hair out of my eyes. “Sorry.”

“Whatever,” Danica scoffs, nudging her way past me. “You are so lucky you didn’t hit me.”

“Why were you making so much noise?” I ask with adrenaline still fueling my racecar heart as I follow her back to her room. She attempts to slam her door, but it meets my open palms and I continue following her.

She doesn’t bother going into her closet before she starts stripping off her clothes.

“Because I’m pissed!” she answers as she skillfully unzips her golden top, yanks it over her head, and hurls it at her bed.

“Why?” I ask, watching as she kicks a purple heel into her closet and disappears in after it.

“Because when I asked Mike to come inside tonight, do you know what he said?”

“What?”

Danica reappears barefoot, her pink toenails matching the thin cami she now has on with the fuchsia skirt she wore out tonight. “He said he has to wake up early!” She throws her hands in the air. “What the hell kind of excuse is that?”

“Maybe he really does . . .” I reason, but Danica jabs a finger at me.

“No, Hailey. No. Mike’s changed.”

“How?” She shimmies out of her skirt and kicks it into the wall before disappearing into her closet again.

“Like tonight, I told him he should get the lobster risotto, but he wouldn’t. I told him how good it was, but he didn’t even care!”

“That’s it?” I ask, and Danica practically teleports back out of her closet, her face a mask of anger.

“That’s it?”

“I mean . . . maybe he just doesn’t like risotto. Mike doesn’t really seem like a risotto kind of guy.”

“How would you know?” Danica sneers. “You don’t even know him.” She stares me down, her eyes narrowing. “Just because he buys you some shitty little flowers because he feels sorry for you doesn’t mean you know anything, Hailey.”

“I was just trying to help . . .”

“Yeah, well, you can help by paying for that three-hundred-dollar lamp you just broke, but like that’s ever going to happen.”

It’s a low blow, and she knows it, but of course I don’t think of any good comebacks until I’m lying in bed later that night.

Yeah, well, not everyone has a rich daddy like you, Dani.

That’s what I should have said. But then she probably would’ve replied with something even meaner. Or worse, maybe she would have told said rich daddy about how I tried to murder her, and then she’d kick me out and he’d stop paying for my school and I’d have to move back to the same little farm in the same little town and live the same little life my parents did, just like their parents did before them.

It’s not that I didn’t like growing up on the farm. I did. I got to feed baby cows and play hide-and-seek in cornfields and run barefoot through the mud. But the world has got to be bigger than cows and cornfields and mud. My world has got to be bigger than cows and cornfields and mud.

After spending another twenty minutes imagining the blow-out argument between Danica and me that never happened, I give up on sleep, roll out of bed, and pad over to my desk, sinking into the canvas camping chair I use as an office chair. My computer screen lights my room as I crisscross my legs in my lap and let out a heavy breath, the shattered lamp and Danica’s words weighing on me.