Shit, I laughed my ass off at that.

And then I worried a little.

She has a friend with two dads, and fortunately, Magnolia’s completely not jealous of her friend’s bounty of fathers. “Why would anyone want two dads? I have none and am super all right—right, PanPan?”

She sounded confident when she asked, but I have such fond memories of my dad, I just don’t know. Still, I said she was right, because I didn’t have a dad anymore either. But is she truly all right?

As the sun rises, I write her a short note in case I leave before she wakes, then I go and get my electronic cigarettes from the nightstand. The key to quitting smoking is to always keep ’em fully charged. I’m on a two-month streak, and I’m not going to start smoking again because of a fucking asshole like Mackenna. I shove the e-cigarettes into my bag and, on impulse, go to the shoebox in my closet where I’ve hidden some old stuff. Prized among those things is a stupid rock he gave me. Why did I save it? I don’t know. It’s a real rock, not a bling rock. I tripped on it once, when he walked me home.

“Kick that,” I said angrily, cupping my bleeding elbow.

“If we kick it, it’ll only trip you again next time you come around. The key to never tripping with the same rock is hang on to it,” he said with a smirk. “You can make sure you’ll never trip with the same rock if you grab on to it and know where it is.”

Thank you, Mackenna, for that nugget of wisdom. I’m going to make sure I never trip over you!

There are people who have an effect on your life. And then there are people who become your life.

Like he did.

I was always a solitary, withdrawn girl, my mother a workaholic, my father a workaholic, both of them strict and pretty much expecting me to focus on grades and grades only. They were always wary of me having bad influences, or even friends, really. This, for some reason, and my choice of clothes, made me the cool girls’ favorite attraction—or distraction. I was the only goth in our grade, and they loved to snicker about my all-black clothes and call me a cutter. But there was this one boy, the coolest bad boy, who stopped the teasing one day. He approached me with a purple scarf I had seen one of the girls wearing earlier, and he draped it around my neck, pulling me to him almost intimately close. “I’ll see you after school,” he said and kissed my forehead. The other girls shut up.

Because everyone would have given a limb to get that attention from “Jones”—and he gave it just like that to me.

And that’s how I fell, like a ton of bricks, for Mackenna Jones.

It turns out he did wait for me after school that day. He drove me home and asked his neighbor to sit in the backseat so “Pandora” could sit up front with him. I didn’t even know he knew my name. “Why’d you do that?” I asked when he walked me up the stairs to my building.

“Why’d you let them?” he returned, those eyes of his making me feel vulnerable and naked and strangely pretty. For a goth, this is big.

Really big.

But I also noticed by his frown that he was displeased.

“I don’t stop them because I don’t give a shit,” I said as I hurried up the steps. He followed, grabbed my wrist, and spun me to face him.

“Hey! Go out with me Friday night.”

“Excuse me?” I sputtered.

“You heard me.”

“Why would you want to go out with someone like me? Your line of fans not long enough?”

“Because the girl I want is right here.”

We started going out in secret, finding hiding places where no one would see us. He told me about music, how he wanted to see the world. He worked as a DJ on the weekends. He had hopes and dreams and wishes. I told him I didn’t know what I wanted to be, and I didn’t have hopes and dreams and wishes. I guess you never feel so hopeless as when you’re with someone who’s bursting with ideas and knows he’s going to take on the world. Even so, he was drawn to me. He teased me, made me laugh, later made me forget about my father’s death and the fact that my mother considered it a betrayal if I ever cried at his loss.

He became my life. I began to wait for his eyes, silver like a wolf’s, to turn to see me. I began to quake and shiver in anticipation of him walking past my locker even if he wasn’t supposed to come over. Sometimes I dropped a pencil, a book, my bag, just so that he could hand it over with that smile of his and brush his thumb over mine. I suppose people wondered about us, but we never gave them proof. Maybe I wondered if he only wanted sex from me, but I also wanted it. I fantasized about it. When it would happen, where it would be, how it would feel, if he’d say nice things to me.

It ended up being amazing. Every time with him. Amazing. Addictive.

I only wanted him.

We fooled around for months before finally going all the way, and things got even more serious after that. I spoke about telling my overprotective mother about us, about taking care of my school grades so she had no excuse to tell me I couldn’t have a boyfriend . . . and just when I was about to say something to her . . .

His father got arrested for drug trafficking. That night, when I got home, my mother was being called by the DA’s office. Mackenna’s hopes were shattered, and I had none of my own to pull us through. I tried to tell my mother that Mackenna and I had “something,” to which she responded by immediately forbidding me to contact “the son.” And after Dad died, even as Mackenna and I planned to leave the city, she watched me like a hawk. . . .