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“Oh,” I say dumbly.

“Let me guess. You've been a goody-goody your whole life. Probably never even took a sip of beer or smoked a cigarette. This is your first time doing anything really bad, isn't it?”

It's hard to wrench the word out of my gut, but I do it anyway.

“Yes.”

“And no offense, but you're good at it. So why not turn it against them? Why not fight Valor?”

My eyes dart to the front seat, where the bugged shirt is ­wadded
up on the floorboard. It can't see us, and I hope to God it can't hear us. If it can, we're already totally screwed.

“How could I fight . . . them? A huge, rich, faceless corporation?” I snort. “How could anyone?”

“I don't know. But between the two of us, we could figure out a way. You might have spent your entire life being good, but there's a rebel somewhere inside you. Your inner yarn bomber says so.”

The food sits heavy as red clay mud in my stomach as we stare at each other. In the dark of the night, we're nothing but shadows. My feelings and thoughts are as tangled as unraveled yarn, loose ends and knots and bursts of violent color. I don't think I can fight something so big. But a few short days ago, I didn't think I could shoot anyone. There's a hardness to Wyatt's eyes that I didn't notice before, a loose confidence in his size and posture. Considering what he's told me, I feel like I should like him less.

And yet I find that I like him more.

Without thinking too much about it, I run my fingertips up his arm to the place where a few harsh, black lines ripple over his skin. Sure enough, I can feel the raised bits, like his skin was burned and stained at the same time.

“Did it hurt?” I ask softly.

“Yeah.”

“Why didn't you finish it?”

“Mikey was working on it, and I looked down and saw the twisted needle, the ripped-open pen. And it just hit me, I guess. I wasn't causing anarchy. I was just . . .”

He trails off.

“Acting out? Punishing your parents?” I poke the black marks. “Being a dick?”

He chuckles. “Yeah. Pick one. But I made him stop. We got in a big fight, and he OD'd right in front of me. I dropped him off at the hospital and never saw him again.”

“And you feel bad about it?”

“Not bad enough to go back.”

I've gone from tracing the tattoo to just touching his arm, enjoying the maplike lines of his veins. His skin jumps when my fingertips skim over the inside of his elbow. “It's kind of funny. You were given everything, and you rebelled. I was given nothing, and I worked my ass off.”

“And now here we are, in the back of a mail truck. Being miserable.”

I have to force myself to look at him. “I'm not actually miserable,” I say.

Wyatt smiles, all soft. “Me neither.”

He pushes up from his slump and turns to face me. Matty moves between our knees, her muzzle wiggling back and forth on the bed and her tail going wild. I sit up straighter as Wyatt leans
closer, holding my breath as his eyes close and his lips brush mine.

“Is this okay?” he murmurs against my mouth, and I barely nod my head yes, not really knowing what
this
is. His lips catch mine again, and his hand finds the back of my head, holding me to him gently but firmly.

Somewhere, deep behind my ribs, in a place I didn't know existed, my heart opens up like one of those blooming tea bags, the ones that start out tiny and dark and then blossom like a flower. I've never let someone kiss me before. I've never let myself want to let it happen. It's as unreal as everything else, but far more welcome.

He shifts, moving closer, his leg lining up with mine. Matty backs up and barks at us like she can't figure out what's going on, if we're trying to eat each other or what. Wyatt's hand strokes her head, and against my mouth, he whispers, “Shhhh, girl. Shhh.” It's the sexiest thing I've ever heard.

My mind floats away, and my body yearns toward his. Misery feels like a long thing, something that eats you, digests you, traps you. I am surely miserable, and misery is a rainstorm. But this moment is an umbrella, a singular thing, a contained thing, a stolen thing, a world infinite in itself. It reminds me of the first time I rode an elevator up a skyscraper downtown and saw how very different things look from above the clouds. As hard as we labor every day, from up above, it's just bright splotches of movement and color.

Wyatt's tongue finds mine, and I wrap my arms around his neck and fall back, pulling him on top of me. He holds himself up on his arms as he kisses me, and I miss that wild freedom from earlier, when he was hugging and tickling me. He's holding something back now, just when I realize I need it most.

“What's wrong?” I say, pulling out of the kiss to gaze into his eyes, breathless.

There's a raw tenderness about him as he strokes my face and says, “Nothing. I just don't want you to regret anything. You already regret too much of what you've done lately.”

“It's just kissing.” But I feel the heat of a blush creeping up my cheeks.

“Is it?”

He runs a hand up my jeans-clad leg, which has somehow twined itself around his hip without my permission or knowledge. His hand is hot and wide, fingers spread, and I tremble when I realize how firmly we've wound around each other in just a few moments of heated kissing. I think of him, in his flimsy pajamas, straddling me, and I wish the darkness would devour us completely so I could lose myself and not feel the judgment in his eyes.

“I'm less miserable,” I whisper.

“Me too,” he whispers back.

“Then come here.”

My hands are still behind his neck, so I firmly pull him down to
me until his chest presses into mine, his weight pinning me to the bed, to the truck, to the ground of what used to be America and is now some bank-owned corporate monarchy.

“I don't know what's going to happen in the next week,” I say into his ear. “But right now I just want to not be alone. I don't want to feel cold.”

He pulls away violently and lands on his feet beside the bed. His nostrils flare wide, his face screwing up in pain. Before I can ask him what's the matter, what I did wrong, he wrenches up the back door of the truck and jumps out.

“Then hug your fucking dog,” he says over his shoulder.

I don't know where Wyatt went, but I burrow into my quilt with ­Matty's head near mine, feeling sorry for myself and weirdly ashamed. She whines a few times like she knows something is wrong and is sad that she can't fix it. I wipe my tears off on her fur.

“I don't understand boys, Matilda,” I whisper to her silky ear.

And it's true. Aside from hanging out with the fun but utterly undateable Jeremy and Roy at work, I've had very little to do with guys. I always have to work a lot, and I won't drink or go to parties, and I won't kiss on a first date, which means there's never been a second date. I've basically come to the conclusion that all the guys at my school are either boring or jerks, and as such, I'm better off without them. I've pretty much decided that I'll meet some awesome,
artsy guy in college, and that's when I'll really figure out what love i
s. It's not like I had any sort of relationship role model.

But I know that I said the wrong thing, that I made Wyatt really angry. So angry that he would rather storm away into the cold fall night than stay in bed with me, which I can't even comprehend. I shiver until I fall asleep, half expecting him to be completely gone when I wake up. But there he is in the front seat of the mail truck, drinking a Big Gulp of steaming coffee, his breath coming out in puffs against a lavender sky. A rolled-up fast-food bag and a smaller cup of coffee sit on top of the microwave, and Matty is eyeing it like it's a lesser god. I didn't even feel the truck moving, although I remember dreaming that I was on a pirate ship in the ocean.

I roll out of bed feeling grouchy and sad and embarrassed and ugly. And seriously uncomfortable. I can't remember the last time I slept in jeans, and I think there might be permanent creases all up and down my legs. I want a shower like whoa. And I can smell my hair, which is in no way sexy. Not that I care about sexy, since Wyatt clearly doesn't want anything to do with me.

Whatever. I don't owe him pretty.

“Morning, Wyatt.” I take a big, unladylike bite of my sausage biscuit and drink some coffee, which I don't really like but am determined not to complain about.

“Morning,” he says, kind of mocking and sad and expectant all at the same time.

“Where'd you sleep?”

“Right here, in the driver's seat.”

“That must have sucked.”

“It did. Thanks for noticing.”

He takes a defiantly deep gulp of his coffee and jerks it away with a muttered, “Shit, that's hot!” Coffee splatters the inside of the truck, and he looks at his lip in the rearview mirror, to see if he's burned it, I guess. I smile a small smile when he's not looking. He's cute when he's pissy. But if he wants to ignore what happened last night, I'm happy to help.

“So where are we?” I ask.

“Outside of Ken Belcher's house.” He takes a daintier sip and grins. “And you're not going to believe where he lives.”

As I stand and stretch, the bottom of my spine cracks from being curled up on the small bed. Matty almost grabs my biscuit, but I snatch it up as I move to the front of the truck and try not to touch Wyatt as I squeeze between the seats. I plop into the passenger seat, my jaw hanging open.

“This place? He lives here?”

The mail truck is parked in a half-paved turn lane, and just in front of us is a house I've passed a thousand times, asking myself a thousand times why it would even exist. It's a gigantic, immensely sprawling mansion that reminds me of something out of Jane ­Austen. Like, it actually has wings and a big circular driveway with an outside
chandelier, and stables, and a guesthouse, and tennis courts, and its own parking lot. And yet here it is, right next to our Podunk town, with a little sign out front telling everyone that it's important enough to have a name.

“Chateau Tuscano,” I murmur.

“Like, do they even care that Chateau is French and Tuscano is both Italian and misspelled?” Wyatt says, and my crush on him grows a little bigger, because that's exactly what bothers me about it too.

“I know, right? And why does it have a parking lot with numbered spaces?” I add. “Like, your billion guests are getting into fights over where to park their limos?”

It's kind of pretty in the early morning for an oversized blight on the countryside. The horses are long gone from the overgrown pastures, and there haven't been grand parties in years. The stupid parking lot used to fill up every weekend, but it's been empty a long time, the snaggletoothed bushes surrounding it taller than me now. I used to imagine Jay Gatsby throwing parties here just to lure Daisy in so she could ruin everything.

And then one day I noticed a For Sale sign in the front yard, the kind that was made just to advertise the exotic allure of Chateau Tuscano. Then that sign was replaced by a standard RE/MAX sign. And then a For Sale by Owner sign—like anyone would just drive on up and knock. And now, for the last few months, a big sign with
a Valor Savings Bank logo and
FORECLOSURE/BANK OWNED
stamped across it in angry red letters.

I gulp the last of my biscuit and swallow it down with coffee. It burns, but I don't mind that. I need all the help I can get keeping the food in my stomach where it belongs. I would have preferred to take my time this morning, to get cleaned up with my wipes and maybe throw a stick for Matty for a while before turning on the GPS machine to find Ken Belcher.

But whether he did it out of malice or kindness, Wyatt brought me here instead. The red clock on the dash gives me a little more than three hours to kill or compel this guy, and my phone is finally dead and can't tell me the actual time.

“Would you mind driving up closer?” I ask.

Without a word, Wyatt cranks the truck on. It rumbles slowly up the long driveway, and he parks just outside of the overhang. Like me, he's probably worried that the rusty chandelier will fall on the truck and flatten it. The concrete is uneven and cracked, with chunks pulling up here and there. The property looks so grand from the street. But up close, it's falling apart like Miss Havisham's cake in
Great Expectations
.

Under the shade of the building, it's even worse. The chandelier is missing crystals, the shards of which glitter on the bricks below. The bushes are overgrown and half-dead. The paint is peeling, and some of the windows are cracked as if they've been
shot out by BB guns. It's almost as bad as Uncle Ashley's house, really.

How low the mighty have fallen.

“Are you ready?” Wyatt's dropped the pissy act and just looks worried for me.

I shrug and tuck the gun into my jeans and find the envelope, pulling out Ken Belcher's card. Wyatt says, “Here,” and hands me the shirt from under his seat, the signature machine and button still carefully wadded up in the center.