فصل 05

FIVE

The endless daylight rewound Leni’s internal clock, made her feel strangely out of step with the universe, as if even time—the one thing you could count on—was different in Alaska. It was daylight when she went to bed and daylight when she woke up.

Now it was Monday morning.

She stood at the window, staring at the newly clean glass, trying to make out her reflection. A useless effort. There was just too much light.

She could only see a ghost of herself, but she knew she didn’t look good, even for Alaska.

First and always was her hair. Long and untamed and red. And there was the milky skin that was standard issue with the hair, and freckles like red-pepper flakes across her nose. The best of her features—her blue-green eyes—were not enhanced by cinnamon-colored lashes.

Mama came up behind her, placed her hands on Leni’s shoulders. “You are beautiful and you will make friends at this new school.”

Leni wanted to take comfort from the familiar words, but how often had they proven untrue? She’d been the new girl at school a lot of times, and she’d never yet found a place she fit in. Something was always wrong about her on the first day—her hair, her clothes, her shoes. First impressions mattered in junior high. She had learned that lesson the hard way. It was hard to recover from a fashion error with thirteen-year-old girls.

“I’m probably the only girl in the whole school,” she said with a dramatic sigh. She didn’t want to hope for the best; dashed hopes were worse than no hopes at all.

“Certainly you’ll be the prettiest,” Mama said, tucking the hair behind Leni’s ear with a gentleness that reminded Leni that whatever happened, she wasn’t ever really alone. She had her mama.

The cabin door opened, bringing in a whoosh of cold air. Dad came in carrying a pair of dead mallards, their broken necks hanging, beaks banging into his thigh. He set his gun in the rack by the door and laid his kill on the wooden counter by the dry sink.

“Ted took me to his blind before dawn. We have duck for dinner.” He slipped in beside Mama and kissed the side of her neck.

Mama swatted him away, laughing. “You want coffee?”

When Mama went into the kitchen, Dad turned to Leni. “You look glum for a girl going off to school.”

“I’m fine.”

“Maybe I know the problem,” Dad said.

“I doubt it,” she said, sounding as dispirited as she felt.

“Let me see,” Dad said, frowning in an exaggerated way. He left her standing there and went into his bedroom. Moments later, he came out carrying a black trash bag, which he set on the table. “Maybe this will help.”

Yeah. What she needed was garbage.

“Open it,” Dad said.

Leni reluctantly ripped the bag open.

Inside, she found a pair of rust-and-black-striped bell-bottoms and a fuzzy ivory-colored wool fisherman’s sweater that looked like it used to be a man’s size and someone had shrunk it.

Oh, my God.

Leni might not know much about fashion, but these were definitely boy’s pants, and the sweater … she didn’t think it had been in style in any year of her life.

Leni caught Mama’s look. They both knew how hard he had tried. And how profoundly he’d failed. In Seattle, an outfit like this was social suicide.

“Leni?” Dad said, his face falling in disappointment.

She forced a smile. “It’s perfect, Dad. Thanks.”

He sighed and smiled. “Oh. Good. I spent a long time picking through the bins.”

Salvation Army. So he had planned ahead, thought of her the other day when they were in Homer. It made the ugly clothes almost beautiful.

“Put them on,” Dad said.

Leni managed a smile. She went into her parents’ bedroom and changed her clothes.

The Irish sweater was too small, the wool so thick she could hardly bend her arms.

“You look gorgeous,” Mama said.

She tried to smile.

Mama came forward with a metal Winnie the Pooh lunch box. “Thelma thought you’d like this.”

And with that, Leni’s social fate was sealed, but there was nothing she could do about it.

“Well,” she said to her dad, “we better move it. I don’t want to be late.”

Mama hugged her fiercely, whispered, “Good luck.”

Outside, Leni climbed into the passenger seat of the VW bus and they were off, bouncing down the bumpy trail, turning toward town, onto the main road, rumbling past the field that called itself an airstrip. At the bridge, Leni yelled, “Stop!”

Dad hit the brakes and turned to her. “What?”

“Can I walk from here?”

He gave her a disappointed look. “Really?”

She was too nervous to smooth his ruffled feelings. One thing that was true of every school she’d been at was this: once you hit junior high, parents were to be absent. The chances of them embarrassing you were sky-high. “I’m thirteen and this is Alaska, where we’re supposed to be tough,” Leni said. “Come on, Dad. Pleeease.”

“Okay. I’ll do it for you.”

She got out of the bus and walked alone through town, past a man sitting Indian-style on the side of the road, with a goose in his lap. She heard him say, No way, Matilda, to the bird as she hurried past the dirty tent that housed the fishing-charter service.

The one-room schoolhouse sat on a weedy lot behind town. Green and yellow marshes spread out behind it, a river meandering in a sloping S-shape through the tall grass. The school was in an A-frame building made of skinned logs, with a steeply pitched metal roof.

At the open door, Leni paused and peered inside. The room was bigger than it looked from the outside; at least fourteen-by-fourteen. There was a chalkboard on the back wall with the words SEWARD’S FOLLY written in capital letters.

At the front of the room, a Native woman stood behind a big desk, facing the door. She was solid-looking, with broad shoulders and big, capable hands. Long black hair, twined into two sloppy braids, framed a face the color of light coffee. Tattooed black lines ran in vertical stripes from her lower lip to her chin. She wore faded Levi’s tucked into rubber boots, a man’s flannel shirt, and a fringed suede vest.

She saw Leni and yelled, “Hello! Welcome!”

The kids in the classroom turned in a screeching of chairs.

There were six students. Two younger kids sat in the front row. Girls. She recognized them from Mad Earl’s compound: Marthe and Agnes. She also recognized that sour-looking teenage boy, Axle. There were two giggling Native girls who looked to be about eight or nine, sitting at desks pushed together; each was wearing a wilted dandelion crown. On the right side of the room a pair of desks were pushed together, side to side, facing the blackboard. One was empty; at the other sat a scrawny boy about her age with shoulder-length blond hair. He was the only student who seemed interested in her. He had stayed turned around in his seat and was still staring at her.

“I’m Tica Rhodes,” the teacher said. “My husband and I live in Bear Cove, so sometimes I can’t get here in winter, but I do my best. That’s what I expect of my students, too.” She smiled. “And you’re Lenora Allbright. Thelma told me to expect you.”

“Leni.”

“You’re what, eleven?” Ms. Rhodes said, studying Leni.

“Thirteen,” Leni said, feeling her cheeks heat up. If only she would start developing boobs.

Ms. Rhodes nodded. “Perfect. Matthew is thirteen, too. Go take a seat over there.” She pointed to the boy with the blond hair. “Go on.”

Leni’s grip on her stupid Winnie the Pooh lunch box was so tight her fingers hurt. “H-hi,” she said to Axle as she passed his desk. He gave her a who cares? glance and went back to drawing something that looked like an alien with massive boobs on his Pee-Chee folder.

She slid bumpily into the seat beside the thirteen-year-old boy. “Hey,” she mumbled, glancing sideways.

He grinned, showing off a mouth full of crooked teeth. “Thank Christ,” he said, shoving the hair out of his face. “I thought I was going to have to sit with Axle for the rest of the year. I think the kid is going to end up in prison.”

Leni laughed in spite of herself.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

Leni never knew how to answer that question. It implied a permanence, a Before that had never existed for her. She’d never thought of any place as home. “My last school was near Seattle.”

“You must feel like you’ve fallen into Mordor.”

“You read Lord of the Rings?”

“I know. Hopelessly uncool. It’s Alaska, though. The winters are dark as shit and we don’t have TV. Unlike my dad, I can’t spend hours listening to old people yammering on the ham radio.”

Leni felt the start of an emotion so new she couldn’t categorize it. “I love Tolkien,” she said quietly. It felt oddly freeing to be honest with someone. Most of the kids at her last school had cared more about movies and music than books. “And Herbert.”

“Dune was amazing. ‘Fear is the mind-killer.’ It’s so true, man.”

“And Stranger in a Strange Land. That’s kinda how I feel here.”

“You should. Nothing is normal in the last frontier. There’s a town up north that has a dog for a mayor.”

“No way.”

“True. A malamute. They voted him in.” Matthew laid a hand to his chest. “You can’t make this crap up.”

“I saw a man sitting with a goose in his lap on the way here. He was talking to the bird, I think.”

“That’s Crazy Pete and Matilda. They’re married.”

Leni laughed out loud.

“You have a weird laugh.”

Leni felt her cheeks heat up in embarrassment. No one had ever told her that before. Was it true? What did she sound like? Oh, God.

“I—I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. My social skills blow. You’re the first girl my age I’ve talked to in a while. I mean. You’re pretty. That’s all. I’m blabbing, aren’t I? You’re probably going to run away, screaming, and ask to sit next to Axle the soon-to-be murderer and it will be an improvement. Okay. I’m shutting up now.”

Leni hadn’t heard anything after “pretty.”

She tried to tell herself it meant nothing. But when Matthew looked at her, she felt a flutter of possibility. She thought: We could be friends. And not ride-the-bus or eat-at-the-same-table friends.

Friends.

The kind who had real things in common. Like Sam and Frodo, Anne and Diana, Ponyboy and Johnny. She closed her eyes for a split second, imagining it. They could laugh and talk and—

“Leni?” he said. “Leni?”

Oh, my God. He’d said her name twice.

“Yeah. I get it. I space out all the time. My mom says it’s what happens when you live in your own head with a bunch of made-up people. Then again, she’s been reading Another Roadside Attraction since Christmas.”

“I do that,” Leni confessed. “Sometimes I just … spaz out.”

He shrugged, as if to imply that there was nothing wrong with her. “Hey, have you heard about the barbecue tonight?”

SO WHAT ABOUT THE PARTY? Can you come?

Leni kept replaying it over and over again as she waited for her dad to pick her up from school. She’d wanted to say yes and mean it. She wanted it more than she’d wanted anything in a while.

But her parents weren’t community barbecue people. Community anything, really. It wasn’t who the Allbrights were. The families in their old neighborhood used to have all kinds of gatherings: backyard barbecues where the dads wore V-necks and drank Scotch and flipped burgers, and the women smoked cigarettes and sipped martinis and carried trays of bacon-wrapped chicken livers while kids screamed and ran around. She knew this because once she’d peered over the neighbors’ fence and seen all of it—hula hoops and Slip ’N Slides and sprinklers.

“So, Red, how was school?” Dad asked when Leni climbed into the VW bus and slammed the door. He was the last parent to arrive.

“We learned about the U.S. buying Alaska from Russia. And about Mount Alyeska in the Chugach Mountain Range.”

He grunted acceptance of that and put the vehicle in gear.

Leni thought about how to say what she wanted to say. There’s a boy my age in class. He’s our neighbor.

No. Mentioning a boy was the wrong tack.

Our neighbors are hosting a barbecue and invited us.

But Dad hated that kind of thing, or he used to, in all the other places they’d lived.

They rattled down the dirt road, dust billowing up on either side, and turned into their driveway. At home, they discovered a crowd of people in the yard. Most of the Harlan clan was there, working. They moved in wordless harmony, coming together and drifting apart like dancers. Clyde had that cage thing and was milling logs into boards. Ted was finishing the cache, pounding boards to the side stanchions. Donna was stacking firewood.

“Our friends showed up at noon to help us prepare for winter,” Dad said. “No. They’re better than friends, Red. They’re comrades.”

Comrades?

Leni frowned. Were they communists now? She was pretty sure her dad hated the commies as much as he hated the Man and hippies.

“This is what the world should be, Red. People helping each other instead of killing their mothers for a little bread.”

Leni couldn’t help noticing that almost everyone had a gun holstered at his or her waist.

Dad opened the bus door. “We’re all going to Sterling this weekend, to fish for salmon at Farmer’s Hole on the Kenai River. Apparently these king salmon are a bitch to land.” He stepped out into the soggy ground.

Mad Earl waved a gloved hand at her dad, who immediately bounded off in the old man’s direction.

Leni walked past a new structure that was about nine feet high by four feet wide, with sides covered in thick black plastic (unspooled garbage bags, Leni was pretty sure). An open door revealed an interior full of sockeye salmon, sliced in half along the spines and hung tented on branches. Thelma was kneeling in the dirt, tending to a fire built in a contained metal box. Smoke puffed up in dark clouds, reached up to the salmon hanging on branches above the fire.

Mama looked up from the salmon she was gutting at a table in the yard. There was a smear of pink guts across her chin. “It’s a smokehouse,” Mama said, cocking her head toward Thelma. “Thelma is teaching me how to smoke fish. It’s quite an art, apparently—too much heat, you cook the fish. It’s supposed to smoke and dry at the same time. Yum. How was your first day of school?” A red kerchief kept the hair out of her eyes.

“Cool.”

“No social-suicide issues with the clothes or the lunch box? No girls making fun of you?”

Leni couldn’t help smiling. “No girls my age at all. But … there’s a boy…”

That got Mama’s interest. “A boy?”

Leni felt herself blushing. “A friend, Mama. He just happens to be a boy.”

“Uh. Huh.” Mama was trying not to smile as she lit her cigarette. “Is he cute?”

Leni ignored that. “He says there’s a community barbecue tonight, and I want to go.”

“Yeah. We’re going.”

“Really? That’s great!”

“Yeah,” Mama said, smiling. “I told you it would be different here.”

WHEN IT CAME TIME to dress for the barbecue, Leni kind of lost her mind. Honestly, she didn’t know what was wrong with her.

She didn’t have a lot of clothes to choose from, but that didn’t stop her from trying on several different combinations. In the end—mostly because she was exhausted by the desire to look pretty when pretty was impossible—she decided on a pair of plaid polyester bell-bottoms and a ribbed green turtleneck beneath a fringed, fake-suede vest. Try as she might, she couldn’t do anything with her hair. She finger-combed it back from her face and twined it into a fuzzy, fist-sized braid.

She found Mama in the kitchen, placing thick squares of cornbread into a Tupperware container. She had brushed her shoulder-length, shag-cut hair until it glimmered in the light. She had definitely dressed to impress in tight bell-bottom jeans and a fitted white sweater with a huge Indian turquoise squash-blossom necklace that she’d bought a few years ago.

Mama seemed distracted as she burped the lid of air from the container.

“You’re worried, aren’t you?”

“Why would you say that?” Mama gave her a quick, bright smile, but the look in her eyes couldn’t be so easily transformed. She was wearing makeup for the first time in days and it made her look vibrant and beautiful.

“Remember the fair?”

“That was different. The guy tried to cheat him.”

That wasn’t how Leni remembered it. They’d been having a good time at the State Fair until her dad started drinking beer. Then some guy had flirted with Mama (and she had flirted back) and Dad had gone ballistic. He shoved the man hard enough to crack his head into the tent pole at the BeerHaus and started yelling. When the security guys came, Dad was so belligerent that the cops were called. Leni had been mortified to see two of her classmates watching the altercation. They’d seen her dad get dragged over to the cop car.

Dad opened the cabin door and came inside.

“Are my beautiful girls ready to party?”

“You bet,” Mama said quickly, smiling.

“Let’s go, then,” Dad said, herding them into the bus.

In no time—it was less than a quarter of a mile as the crow flew—they drove up to the steel gate with the bleached-white cow head on it. The gate was open in welcome.

The Walker homestead. Their nearest neighbors.

Dad drove slowly forward. The driveway (two ribbons of flattened grass that undulated up and down on lichen-covered ground) unfurled in a lazy S through stands of skinny black-trunked spruce trees. Occasionally there was a break in the trees to her left and Leni saw a splash of distant blue, but it wasn’t until they came to the clearing that Leni saw the view.

“Wow,” Mama said.

They emerged onto a flat ridge situated above a calm blue cove. The huge piece of land had been cleared of all but a few carefully chosen trees and planted in hay.

A large two-story log house sat like a crown at the highest point of land. Its triangular front boasted huge trapezoid windows and a pointed, wraparound deck. It looked like the prow of some great ship, flung to shore by an angry sea and stuck on land, forever gazing out at the sea upon which it belonged. Mismatched chairs decorated the deck, each one turned toward the spectacular view. On the far side of the house were several animal pens full of cows and goats and chickens and ducks. Coils of barbed wire, wooden crates and pallets, a broken-down tractor and the rusted shovel from an excavator, and the husks of several dead and dying trucks lay scattered in the knee-high grass. Beehives stood clustered together not far from a small wooden structure that puffed smoke. In a break in the trees was the sharp peaked roof of an outhouse.

Down at the water, a gray dock jutted out into the blue sea. At its end, a weathered arch read WALKER COVE. A float plane was tied up to the dock, in addition to two bright silver fishing boats.

“A float plane,” Dad muttered. “Must be rich.”

They parked the bus and walked past a bright yellow tractor with a black bucket and a shiny red all-terrain vehicle. From the crested rise, Leni saw people gathered down on the beach, at least a dozen of them, around a huge bonfire. Flames shot into the light lavender sky, making a sound like fingers snapping.

Leni followed her parents down the stairs to the beach. From here, she could see everyone at the party. A broad-shouldered man with long blond hair was sitting on a fallen log playing a guitar. Large Marge had turned two white plastic buckets into bongo drums, and Leni’s teacher, Ms. Rhodes, was going crazy on a fiddle. Natalie was wicked with a harmonica and Thelma was singing “King of the Road.” On means by no means everyone joined in.

Clyde and Ted were handling the barbecue, which looked to have been made out of old oil drums. Mad Earl stood nearby, drinking from a crockery jug. The two younger girls from school, Marthe and Agnes, were down at the waterline, bent over, collecting shells with Moppet.

Mama stepped down onto the beach, carrying her Tupperware full of cornbread. Dad was right behind her with a fifth of whiskey.

The big, broad-shouldered man playing the guitar put down his instrument and got to his feet. He was dressed like most of the men here, in a flannel shirt and faded jeans and rubber boots, but even so, he stood out. He looked as if he’d been built for this rugged land, as if he could run all day, hack down an old-growth tree with a hatchet, and skip nimbly along a fallen log over a raging river. Even Leni thought he was handsome—for an old guy. “I’m Tom Walker,” he said. “Welcome to my place.”

“Ernt Allbright.”

Tom shook Dad’s hand.

“This is my wife, Cora.”

Mama smiled at Tom, shook his hand, then looked back. “This is our daughter, Leni. She’s thirteen.”

Tom smiled at Leni. “Hey, Leni. My son, Matthew, mentioned you.”

“He did?” Leni said. Don’t smile so big. What a dork.

Geneva Walker slipped in beside her husband. “Hey,” she said, smiling at Cora. “I see you’ve met my husband.”

“Ex.” Tom Walker put his arm around Geneva, pulled her close. “I love the woman like air, but I can’t live with her.”

“Can’t live without me, either.” Geneva smiled, cocked her head to the left. “That’s my main squeeze over there. Calhoun Malvey. He doesn’t love me as much as Tom does, but he likes me a helluva lot better. And he doesn’t snore.” She elbowed Mr. Walker in the side playfully.

“I hear you guys aren’t too well prepared,” Mr. Walker said to Dad. “You’re going to have to learn fast. Don’t be afraid to ask me for help. I’m always up for it. Anything you need to borrow, I have.”

Leni heard something in Dad’s “Thanks” that put her on alert. He sounded irritated all of a sudden. Offended. Mama heard it, too; she glanced worriedly at him.

Mad Earl stumbled forward. He was wearing a T-shirt that read I’VE BEEN FISHING SO LONG I’M A MASTER BAITER. He grinned drunkenly, swayed side to side, stumbled. “You offering Ernt help, Big Tom? That’s mighty white of you. Sorta like King John offerin’ to help his poor serfs. Maybe your friend the governor can help ya out.”

“Good Lord, Earl, not again,” Geneva said. “Let’s play some music. Ernt, can you play an instrument?”

“Guitar,” Dad said. “But I sold—”

“Great!” Geneva said, taking him by the arm, pulling him away from Mad Earl and toward Large Marge and the makeshift band gathered at the beach. She handed Dad the guitar Mr. Walker had put down. Mad Earl stumbled over to the fire and retrieved his crockery jug.

Leni wondered if Mama knew how beautiful she looked, standing there in her form-fitting pants, with her blond hair blowing in the sea breeze. Her beauty was as clear as a perfectly sung note and as out of place up here as an orchid.

Yeah. She knew exactly how beautiful she was. And Mr. Walker saw it, too.

“Can I get you something to drink?” he asked Mama. “Is a beer okay?”

“Why, sure, Tom. I’d love a beer,” Mama said, letting Mr. Walker lead her toward the food table and the cooler full of Rainier beer.

Mama drifted along beside Mr. Walker. Her hips took up the beat of the music, swaying. She touched his forearm, and Mr. Walker looked down at her and smiled.

“Leni!”

She heard her name being called and turned.

Matthew stood on the point above, not far from the stairs, waving at her to come up.

She climbed the stairs and found him, holding a beer in each hand. “You ever had a beer before?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Me, either. Come on.” He took off into the thicket of trees to his left. They followed a twisting trail that led downward, past rock outcroppings.

He led her to a small clearing, its floor padded by lichen. Through an opening in the black spruce trees, they could see the party. The beach was only fifteen feet away but might have been a different universe. Out there, the adults were laughing and talking and making music. Little kids were pawing through pebbles for unbroken shells. Axle was off by himself, stabbing his knife into a decaying log.

Matthew sat down, stretching his legs out, leaning back against a log. Leni sat down beside him, close but not so close that she was touching him.

He snapped open a beer—hiss—and handed it to her. Wrinkling her nose, she took a sip. It fizzed in her throat and tasted bad.

“Gross,” Matthew said, and she laughed. Another three sips and she leaned back into the log. A cool breeze came up off the beach, bringing with it the smell of brine and the pungent aroma of roasting meat. The whir and movement of the party was just beyond the trees.

They sat in a companionable silence, which amazed Leni. Usually she was a nervous wreck around kids she wanted to befriend.

Out on the beach, the party was in full swing now. Through a break in the trees, they could see it all. A mason jar was being passed from person to person. Her mother danced in a hip-swaying, hair-tossing way. She was like a woodland fairy, lit from within, dancing for the burly, sodden tree folk.

The beer made Leni feel woozy and light-headed, as if she were full of bubbles.

“What made you guys move up here?” Matthew asked. Before she could answer, he smashed his empty beer can into a rock, crumpling it.

Leni couldn’t help laughing. Only a boy would do that. “My dad’s kind of … an adventurer,” she settled on as her answer. (Never tell the truth, never that Dad had trouble keeping a job and staying in one place, and never that he drank too much and liked to yell.) “He got tired of Seattle, I guess. What about you guys? When did you move here?”

“My grandpa, Eckhart Walker, came to Alaska during the Great Depression. He said he didn’t want to stand in line for watery soup. So he packed up his stuff and hitchhiked to Seattle. He worked his way north from there. Supposedly he walked Alaska from shore to shore and even climbed Mount Alyeska with a ladder strapped to his back so he could cross glacial crevasses. He met my Grandma Lily in Nome. She ran a laundry and diner. They got married and decided to homestead.”

“So your grandparents and your dad and you all grew up in that house?”

“Well. The big house was built a lot later, but we all grew up on this land. My mom’s family lives in Fairbanks. My sister is living with them while she goes to college. And my folks split up a few years back, so Mom built herself a new house on the homestead and moved into it with her boyfriend, Cal, who is a real douchebag.” He grinned. “But we all work together. He and Dad play chess in the winter. It’s weird, but it’s Alaska.”

“Wow. I can’t even imagine living in one place my whole life.” She heard the edge of longing in her voice and was embarrassed by it. She tilted her beer up, swallowed the last foamy drips.

The makeshift band was going all-out now, hands banging on buckets, the guitar strumming, fiddles playing.

Thelma and Mama and Ms. Rhodes were swishing their hips in time to the music, singing loudly. Ro-cky Moun-tain high, Color-ado …

Over at the grill, Clyde yelled out, “Moose burgers are ready! Who wants cheese?”

“Come on,” Matthew said. “I’m starving.” He took her hand (it seemed natural) and led her through the trees and down onto the beach. They came up behind Dad and Mad Earl, who were off by themselves, drinking, and Leni heard Mad Earl clink his mason jar against Dad’s, hitting it so hard it made a sturdy clank. “Tha’ Tom Walker sure thinks his shit don’t stink,” Dad said.

“When TSHTF, he’ll come crawling to me ’cuz I’m prepared,” Mad Earl slurred.

Leni froze, mortified. She looked at Matthew. He’d heard it, too.

“Born rich,” Dad added, his words slurred and slow in coming. “Thass what you said, right?”

Mad Earl nodded, stumbled into Dad. They held each other up. “He thinks he’s better’n us.”

Leni pulled away from Matthew; shame made her feel small. Alone.

“Leni?”

“I’m sorry you heard that,” she said. And as if her dad’s slurred bad-mouthing weren’t bad enough, there was Mama over there, standing too close to Mr. Walker, smiling up at him in a way that could start trouble.

Just like all the other times. And Alaska was supposed to be different.

“What’s the matter?” Matthew asked.

Leni shook her head, feeling a familiar sadness creep in. She could never tell him how it felt to live with a dad who scared you sometimes and a mother who loved him too much and made him prove how much he loved her in dangerous ways. Like flirting.

These were Leni’s secrets. Her burdens. She couldn’t share them.

All this time, all these years, she’d dreamed of having a real friend, one who would tell her everything. How had she missed the obvious?

Leni couldn’t have a real friend because she couldn’t be one. “Sorry,” she mumbled. “It’s nothing. Come on, let’s eat. I’m starving.”