And then there was Sam. I tried not to think about him. I tried.

“I can’t breathe,” I said, and the dad sat me down on the pea gravel.

“Put your head between your legs.” He rubbed my back. “Does she have a cell phone?”

I shook my head.

“Have you checked your phone?”

I didn’t respond. He reached into my purse and found it.

“You’ve missed six calls.”

I grabbed it from him and put in my password. It was Gemma’s calls I had missed.

“Violet,” I said in a cracking voice when she answered. “She’s gone.”

“I got a call five minutes ago. From a truck driver.” She paused, as though she might not tell me more. “She’s at a rest stop on the side of the highway. I’m going to get her.” She hung up without saying good-bye. The dad helped me to my feet and we went to find the teacher to call off the search. I sat in the tiny gift shop with a bottle of water and tried calling you again and again, but you didn’t answer.

An hour later, we were back on the bus and took the same spots we’d had on the way there. The volume was noticeably lower now, the effect of the fresh air muffling the volcano of energy from before. Nobody said anything about Violet—it was as though she hadn’t ever been there. When we arrived back at the school parking lot, I crouched at my seat and watched the students make their way off the bus. I checked the back to make sure nothing had been left behind and found the bracelet on the seat where the braided girls had been. The purple and yellow and gold beads Violet had been diligently stringing the night before. She must have made it for one of them. It was untied, abandoned. I turned the beads back and forth between my fingers.

“Hey,” I called out to the three girls. They sat on the school steps waiting for their parents to pick them up. “Did you drop this?”

Two of them stared at the ground.

“I said, did one of you drop this?”

I held it out in the palm of my hand and they all shook their heads. I closed my hand around the bracelet and stared at the girls until a car pulled up. They looked straight ahead and didn’t say a word.

* * *

? ? ?

At home I put the bracelet deep in my bottom drawer where I knew Violet wouldn’t find it. Everything that had happened that day changed how I saw her. She was powerless among her friends, and she didn’t want me to see that. She was no longer the girl who could so easily intimidate others, who could effortlessly hurt people with what she said or did. They could see through her now, and for a moment, I almost felt bad for her.

I called Gemma that night, although I wasn’t sure she would answer. I straightened in the kitchen chair when she did.

“I just wanted to check on her. How’s she doing?”

“She’s been quiet. But fine.” I heard her cover the receiver and whisper something. She was silent. I imagined her turning to you and rolling her eyes. She doesn’t get it—she was running away from HER. SHE is the problem. I imagined you gesturing for her to hang up. I imagined the bottle of wine you would have opened now that the kids were in bed. I looked around my dim, quiet kitchen. I wanted to remind Gemma that I’d once been the mother she herself had turned to, before she had it all figured out. That she’d searched my face for the secrets of how to mother her own child. I had lied to her. But I was still the same woman she had called her best friend. I couldn’t help myself.

“How are you? How’s Jet?”

“Good-bye, Blythe.”

75

For a long time after the field trip, I didn’t see Violet. I filled my time writing, agreeing to see the agent when he asked to come over, although at some point I started to feel even lonelier when he was there.

He would run the shower while I checked the weather. Rainy and cold. Bring an umbrella today, I would say. He would ask about my plans. Writing, calling someone to clean the gutters. Did he have time for breakfast? He did not—a meeting at eight o’clock, remember? Would he want to come over that night? He couldn’t—dinner with a new author. He would come tomorrow instead. Would I make that lamb stew? He would step past the partition into the shower where he could have been anyone behind the wet, distorted glass—it was then I would watch him. He would leave the bathroom door open so the steam wouldn’t fill the mirror. I didn’t like the streaks the towel left when he wiped it before he shaved. I didn’t like the speckles of his shavings in my sink. Before he was done, I would leave to boil water for the tea. Downstairs he would kiss me good-bye and I would barely lean into him. I’m not sure he ever noticed.

76

On a random day in June, Violet called to ask if she could stay with me for the weekend. She hadn’t wanted to stay the weekend since the beginning of the school year. I canceled my plans with the agent and told her to tell you she’d be with me. The overnight bag she put in the trunk when I picked her up from school was full of clothes I’d never seen before. I was missing so much of her life. The gold sparkly leggings made me sad—they were something I should have bought her if I’d seen them in a store, but I didn’t think to buy her things anymore.

We went to the movies and had ice cream afterward. We didn’t speak much but there was something about her that was less agitated. Less bristly. I was cautious. I gave her space. At one point we were in the car and a skit came on the radio, something about a cat in heat. I wasn’t sure she knew what that meant, but we looked at each other and laughed and I felt my stomach sink. Not for the moment we shared, but for how foreign it had felt—how much we had missed.