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  “Pardon me?”

  Jane beams at me. “The money we get on your behalf, Wes puts into savings. A little something to help you with college.”

  “College,” I half say, half ask. My voice cracks. I know I’m all worked up and having a hard time turning it back down.

  Thomas sings out another uh-oh. I’d scowl at him if he weren’t immune to my dirty looks but even more, I feel like someone just punched me in the stomach. I grip the seat of my chair. I don’t expect people to do nice things for me. It’s easier when they don’t and really a lot easier when they don’t promise stuff.

  “I don’t… believe you,” I manage.

  Jane looks wounded. “Why would I lie?”

  “It’s absolutely true,” Wes says. His eye twitches, like it does anytime a conversation becomes strained.

  “How do you know I even want to go to college?”

  Jane’s discomfort is evident she looks to Wes for help and then back to me. “You’re so smart. I figured…”

  “What did you figure?” I snap. Me going to college is like me becoming a ballerina or an astronaut and I hate her for a minute or two. Or more.

  Wes grins. “I thought you could become an accountant.”

  Oh well. Fuck me sideways. An accountant. Doesn’t every single little girl dream of growing up to be an accountant?

  “Hey, ya know what?” Michael asks.

  No one says anything, so Trig, quiet till now, answers. “What buddy?”

  “I got a list!” he says, his whole face lighting up. “All of us got a list.”

  What he’s talking about is anyone’s guess, but he jumps down off his chair and bolts from the dining room. The other three little warts race after him. A minute later they’re back with little scribbled bits of paper with their Christmas list. Thomas, who can barely even freaking speak, has two lists.

  Trig starts talking to Wes and the whole conversation about me getting a job just stops. I’m forced to sit there and pretend to read the ridiculous things on the boys’ lists while they eye me for my reaction. One of them wants a baby sister. I am so going to put the hurt on whoever wrote that. I hope Jane hasn’t looked at these.

  Jane gets up and asks the boys to help clear the table. Wes hops up to supervise the chaos.

  Trig leans his elbows on the table and smirks. “You walked right into that one.”

  His eyes twinkle. Little gleams of happiness. He’s as impossible as the monkeys, I swear.

  “Oh, shut the hell up.” I snarl at him. It’s just the two of us in the dining room but I don’t cuss in front of Wes or Jane or the boys. Just Trig, and not often. He still scares me, some, but what’s the worst he can do here in the dining room?

  “Want to see my list?” He lifts his brow and gives me what might be interpreted as a lascivious look. Can the evening get worse?

  “You can’t say gross stuff to me.”

  He looks affronted. “Who said it was going to be gross? Jesus, don’t flatter yourself.”

  “Don’t you have a girl friend?”

  “I do not.”

  Michael comes in to pick up a couple of plates and heads back into the kitchen.

  “Why not? Is it because you have trouble in that department? Is that’s what’s on your list? A prescription for little pink pills?”

  “Hold on, now. You can’t say gross stuff to me either. Besides, it’s a blue pill, dumbass. Pink!” He snorts.

  I snicker, my dark mood suddenly lifted. “So you know something about those little pills do you?”

  “It’s common knowledge, Maggie.”

  I shrug. “So, why don’t you have a girl-friend?”

  “I like to keep to myself.”

  I roll my eyes and I’m about to fire something back before he interrupts me.

  “If you’re job hunting, you’re going to have to wear something other than your nasty black armor you always have on. People don’t want to hire some emo-girl. You’ll scare the customers away.”

  He’s a dick but I’m pretty sure he’s right. The way I dress scares some of the kids in school. For the first month, no one besides Kyle talked to me.

  “You still have that money I gave you?” he asks.

  My breath stalls in my lungs and I’m praying he doesn’t say anything about that day. The memory is always right there but I’ve never brought up how he held me and said those awful things while looking down into his dark basement. That scared the shit out of me.

  “If you don’t, I can give you some more. You could go buy some non-black stuff and get yourself a little job.”

  “I never spent it,” I say quietly. He’d given me two hundred and fifty dollars that morning when he picked me up on the side of the road. I assumed he’d forgotten about it and that’s why he hadn’t asked for it back. I keep it in an envelope under my mattress, so if he ever asked I could hand it right back.

  He takes out his wallet and drops two hundred on the table cloth.

  “Is that my Christmas present, Uncle Trig.” I halfway manage a sneer but it doesn’t come out the way I intended. It sounds whiny. Lame.

  He gets up from his chair, circles the table and bends down. “It’s a Christmas present for me, Maggie. For Christmas I want to see you in something other than black.”

  Stepping into the kitchen he thanks Jane for dinner and says goodnight. The monkeys all shout and clamor, telling him about their school stuff coming up and will he come watch them be a pilgrim or a turkey or whatever. He grumbles, good-naturedly, promising to be there.

  Gritting my teeth, I think how none of the monkeys asked me to go, but then again, that’s a good thing. Some stupid Thanksgiving pageant would just remind me how much I don’t belong with this family or any family. I don’t like kids, so I can’t imagine going to see a bunch of them toddle around a stage in stupid outfits. I’m freaking glad they didn’t ask.

  Trig says good-bye to each of them, along with Wes and Jane. He walks out of the kitchen, crosses the dining room silently, stealthily, and as he passes behind me, he gives a strand of my hair a soft tug.

  His footsteps fade. The door of his truck slams, the engine roars to life and he backs out of the driveway. I watch the headlights recede in the fog until he reaches the end of the drive, and he guns the engine and disappears into the dark night.

  Chapter Eight

  Trig

  The beginning of December rolls around and Jane asks me to come for dinner to celebrate Maggie’s birthday. She tells me she’s running around like a crazy person and wants to know if I can pick up a cake from the bakery, a new little shop that opened on the main square. I decide to get the cake before I pick up Maggie from school, so it’s there waiting for her when she gets home.

  As I pay for the cake, I see a sign taped to the cash register. They need a part-time baker on the week-ends so I take a business card.

  I can’t imagine Maggie working here making cakes like the one Jane ordered for her. The cake is decorated with daisies and a pink trim. Doesn’t seem like Maggie’s MO. She’d rather ice cakes with jet-black icing. The thought makes me smile.

  When I drop the cake off at the house, I toss Maggie’s present on her bed. It’s a winter coat. Jane hasn’t noticed that grunge girl goes to school in the same black hoodie every damn day. Weeks ago, I gave her money to buy something for herself but she’s in the same ugly stuff she’s been in since day one. I figure if I give her money to pick out a coat, she’ll squirrel it away. She can either wear what I got her. Or freeze.

  I can hear her reply in my mind. Whatever…

  An envelope lies on her bed, from the College Board. For weeks, she’s waited for her SAT scores to arrive, nervously speculating on her results. One day she frets she’s bombed the reading portion. The next day she’s sure she did horribly in math.

  I turn the envelope over in my hand, wondering what her scores are. Wes and Jane wouldn’t dream of opening her mail, but I have no such problem. She’s permanently mad at me anyway. I have nothin
g to lose.

  Jane keeps going on about how smart Maggie is in math and that she should study accounting. Accounting! Shit. Sounds like torture to me, and it makes me wonder if Jane’s getting even with Maggie for being such a surly little shit. Accounting… Jesus.

  Strolling back to the door, I tear open the envelope and read the scores. Total is 1480. Damn. I knew the girl was smart, but that’s really good. Jane likes to brag about her 1400, the score that got her into Brown. Wait till she sees Maggie’s score. I scan the rest of the document and stop at the Math score. She got an 800. A perfect score. I blink and tilt the paper toward the light. I read it right.

  All the way to the high school I can’t keep from smiling. When I pull up to the front of the school, she’s talking to Kyle and two other girls. Talking and laughing with them, she hasn’t seen me and I have a chance to watch her. Usually, when we’re together, she’s either got a sassy-as-hell expression or a carefully guarded look on her face. Rolling her eyes at something one of the kids say, she looks young and carefree. Nothing like the frightened little bird from a few months ago.

  She and Kyle come to the truck, her face pinched from the cold.

  “Can we give him a ride home, Uncle Trig?” she asks.

  Her tone is pure sass.

  “Sure. Fine.” I drum my fingers on the steering wheel.

  They pile in and Maggie’s sitting so close to me I can smell the floral soap she uses. Nice. Sweet. Not what you’d expect from a girl dressed in black from head to toe.

  “Hi Trig,” Kyle says, leaning forward and smiling. “Thank you for the ride.”

  “No problem.” I wave the envelope. “Your scores, Maggie.”

  “Dang,” Kyle mutters. “That means mine are in my mail box.”

  He groans, maybe because he didn’t knock it out of the park like Maggie.

  She snatches the envelope and noticing the tattered edge, elbows me. “Nosy.”

  I thought she’d give me way more grief than that, but she’s too excited to bitch about it right now.

  Kyle and Maggie peer at the report, their gaze downturned, heads almost touching. They touch each other every so often, I notice, but not in a romantic way. I’m pretty sure Maggie was right about Kyle being gay, but I’m one hundred percent positive she isn’t gay. She just likes to yank my chain, rile me up, then laugh about it and call me a sucker.

  I keep driving. After a few moments, there’s a reaction.

  “Holy. Shit.” Maggie’s voice is no more than a whisper.

  “You… bitch,” Kyle murmurs.

  “You’re a pretty smart girl, aren’t you, Maggie? Glad I didn’t let you go to Vegas?”

  “Ugh,” she grouses.

  “You were going to go to Vegas? Without me?” Kyle asks.

  “It was before I met you. I was running away. Trig stopped me.” She explains without looking up from the report.

  “Huh,” the boy replies. “What were you going to do? Strip?”

  She shrugs a shoulder. “Maybe.”

  “You could make a killing. With that rack.” He whistles.

  I glance over at Kyle to give him a look, one that tells him to shut the fuck up, but he’s staring out the window.

  “Is this something I need to know about, Maggie? Something between you and Kyle?”

  Her eyes sparkle. “Kyle and I are lovers.”

  Kyle snorts. “She swam at my house in the beginning of the year.”

  Maggie leans close to whisper. “Nekkid…”

  Kyle shakes his head, giving me a wide-eyed, scared-shitless look, like he expects to have my fist in his face any moment.

  “She wasn’t naked. She was in a swimsuit… Sir.”

  “But I could make money doing that,” she says earnestly. “Going to Vegas. I know lots of foster kids, girls obviously, who did that when they turned eighteen. They earned enough to start a nail salon or bakery or whatever.”

  I grit my teeth. Great. Just great. I hand her the best damn SAT scores in the history of college entrance and she’s talking about Vegas. I shoot her a warning look. “We need to have another little talk?”

  We almost never talk about that day.

  Her smile vanishes. “No. I’ll stop. Besides, I want to go to Colorado. Remember?”

  I grunt in reply. I know she’s giving me shit about stripping, but the conversation reminds me of how easily she could have slipped away. When I’d caught her trying to run away, I’d reveled in thwarting her plans. I’d put on the mean and dangerous act as much for Wes and Jane’s sake as for Maggie’s. I wanted to spare them the pain and despair of having one of their kids disappear.

  But something’s changed in the last few months. I don’t just want Maggie in Wes and Jane’s home, safe and cared for, I want good things for her. I want her to reach her hopes and her dreams. I don’t know if she has any, but maybe this piece of paper will prove something to her.

  I stop at Kyle’s house and he gets out and turns with a mournful expression. “I’ll call you with my scores. I don’t think they’ll be like yours. Now I get why you know more than Mr. Phillips.”

  “Who’s that?” I ask.

  “Our math teacher. Maggie had to explain the difference between linear growth and exponential growth.”

  “Wow.” I nudge her with my shoulder. Kyle’s out of the truck and she could shift over to his spot, but she’s still sitting right beside me, probably because she’s freezing.

  “Good for you,” I tell her. “You little math wiz.”

  She blushes. I can’t believe it. The girl actually gets rosy cheeks. She doesn’t say a word all the way home, not one single smart-assed reply. She’s hopefully trying to imagine what her amazing scores might mean. I’m wondering too. When I was her age, I’d dropped out of high school so I could recover from the wreck and from there I went straight to work. Back then, there was only one path in front of me. Maggie’s got a thousand.

  Chapter Nine

  Maggie

  “A perfect score,” Jane gushes, later that night as we clear the dinner dishes. “Everything’s coming together for my girl, even better than I imagined.”

  Last week I finished Driver’s Ed and passed the driving test. When they handed me my little, temporary, paper license, you’d have thought I’d won the Nobel Peace Prize or something. Jane’s enthusiasm is so over the top on every little achievement, it’s exhausting. Everything is cause for celebration. Thomas made it a whole week in kindergarten without biting anyone. Woo! Let’s have a parade! Michael got a hundred on his math quiz! Let’s make cupcakes!

  Wes brings a stack of dessert plates. He’s shaking his head, still in disbelief about the perfect score. “I’ve never known someone to get an eight hundred.”

  Trig appears in the doorway. His head clears the top of the doorframe by only a few inches, his shoulders span the width. He spends the day working on trucks and semi-trucks but you’d think he breaks rocks for a living. Crushing them with his hands or something. I don’t notice his height and build as much when he’s sitting at the table or driving me to school.

  The grin on his face tells me he’s got some little jab for me.

  “Now if we could just get her to have a little common sense and wear a coat.”

  “That’s such a nice coat you got her Trig. I feel awful she didn’t have one,” Jane clucks. “It takes a village.”

  “It’s the wrong color for me. I need to exchange it,” I tell him.

  Trig’s smile widens. “Too bad they don’t have black.”

  I open the dishwasher and start loading water glasses. “I need anything but red.”

  The box lay on my bed, and I found it when I got home. At first, I didn’t notice because Jane and Wes had stuffed about two thousand balloons in my room. They floated and bobbed along the ceiling, a dozen different colors. The coat is cherry red, down-filled and goes almost to my knees.

  “Do the boys have coats?” Wes asks.

  Jane nods. “Coats, hats, boots and mittens
.”

  Trig frowns at me. “What’s wrong with red?”

  I shrug. “Redheads can’t wear red. I’m a redhead.”

  Michael walks into the kitchen, licking birthday cake icing from his fingers. “You’re not a redhead. You’re a blackhead.”

  No one else speaks. Wes, Jane and Trig all stare at me like I just told them I’m a Russian spy or something. Trig’s brows lift and his smirk shifts into a bemused smile.

  “I put stuff in my hair to make it black.” I tell Michael.

  He screws up his face with evident disgust and wanders out of the kitchen, probably to steal more icing from the cake, if the other monkeys haven’t beaten him to it. Leaving cake or anything sweet unattended in this house usually results in it being devoured by the boys. They’re like locusts.

  Jane breaks the silence. “You shouldn’t dye your hair. Red is so pretty! Maybe you’d stop getting turned down for jobs.”

  I draw a sharp breath at her words. Embarrassment twists inside me. I’ve applied at three different stores in the last week and each of them turned me away with some vague, we’ll call if we have a position come open.

  At the last one, some stuck-up blonde Barbie doll curled her lip while she gave me a once over. I told her to go fuck herself and walked out.

  “Hey, maybe you could work for Trig,” Jane exclaims. Her eyes light with excitement. “That would be perfect! She could answer the phone or something.”

  I keep from rolling my eyes. Barely. Jane doesn’t have a bad bone in her body, but she does this thing. Like I’m an idiot and can’t figure stuff out for myself. Her suggesting I work for Trig makes it so much worse. I don’t need pity for fuck’s sake and I sure don’t need a hand out from Trig. The man who sees me as nothing more than a project. Or a problem.

  Trig’s eyes darken. “I don’t hire girls.”

  His tone grates. I’m pissed at him for how superior he acts, and pissed at myself for how much I care.