FYI, I'm not saying you have to listen to the Camila Cabello song above to appreciate this chapter, but it doesn't hurt.

****

My bike was in the garage.

That was the only positive thing I discovered that night, after my father had reluctantly let me sit at the dinner table despite the fact that he was still furious with me. My stepmother, Laura, had insisted that we should eat something and have a good night's sleep before he could grill me more about any of the details of where I'd been.

It was the longest, most silent meal in history. The spaghetti went down like a rock.

Laura tried to make conversation for a while, letting me know that Kieren had found my bike abandoned by the gym and had brought it back for me. "You really owe that boy a thank you," she chimed in.

No one spoke after that.

Laura loaned me her cell phone for the night when I told her mine was gone, and I used it to let Kieren know I was back.

Then I sat on my bed and called Christy. We'd been friends for so long, even Laura had her number saved in her phone in case of emergencies.

"Where were you?" was all she asked. I had forgotten to ask Kieren to let her know I was safe, and she had spent two days assuming I was sick in bed before swinging by my house, where my father had told her I was missing.

"I had to go help a friend," I said, giving the same vague and ridiculous answer I had asked Kieren to tell my dad.

She didn't say anything for a minute.

"Christy?" I asked.

"Yeah, I'm here. I'm just trying to understand. I don't keep secrets from you."

"I know you don't."

"Sometimes I just wish... I wish I knew you better."

"I know."

There was something else I knew I had to ask her, but I wasn't sure if she would do it. Yet I didn't really have a choice.

"I need a favor," I finally said in a low voice.

"Okay."

"I need you to go to the pharmacy and get me something, please."

She sighed, annoyed. "Why don't you get it yourself?"

"Because," I hesitated, clearing my throat. "My birthday's not for seven weeks and they won't sell it to me if I'm not eighteen."

There was silence on the other end of the line. For a minute, I thought maybe she had hung up on me.

"Christy?"

"Why can't Brady go?" she finally asked.

I hesitated, not wanting to tell her any more lies. "It wasn't Brady," I finally admitted.

She was silent again. I sat in my bed, clutching Laura's phone.

"I'll drop it off in an hour," she finally said, and then hung up before I could tell her that I would pay her back.

The next four weeks passed in a haze of guilt, depression, and the occasional burst of boredom. I didn't know which was worse. After having spent a week in the extreme stress of fearing for my life and having what I supposed I could officially refer to as my first real love affair, the daily ritual of getting up, getting dressed, brushing my teeth, and trudging through school just didn't seem to be firing off the neurons in my brain in any noticeable way.

I supposed that was the real danger of DW. It doesn't take long before you get addicted to the drug of adrenaline. After it's gone, nothing really feels like anything anymore.

My father finally told me that he wasn't mad at the fact that I had left, he was mad because I wouldn't tell him where I had been. "I thought we trusted each other," he said, his voice broken.

I bowed my head, nodding into the floor.

After a week of him giving me the silent treatment, I finally went out to his garage lab one night and helped him reassemble a computer. He didn't speak to me the whole time, except to ask me to hand him some wires at one point. I took that as a positive sign.

At school, it didn't seem to surprise anyone very much that the new AP History teacher had fled the coop.

"Boy, that didn't take long," Adrian Washington joked when we showed up on Monday morning to find that Principal Farghasian herself was teaching the class.

"Just until I find another sub for you guys," she said from the whiteboard as she furiously tried to scan through Adam's notebook to see what she was supposed to be teaching us.

The only one who seemed truly disappointed was Angela Piernot, much to Adrian's annoyance.

"I just don't understand it," I heard her whispering to one of her girlfriends behind me. "Who teaches a class for a week and a half and then splits?"

After that, nobody mentioned Adam again. It was like he had never been there.

We made it through Thanksgiving break somehow. Robbie and Piper didn't come home for it. They said the tickets were too expensive and they had too much studying to do. They planned to come for Christmas instead.

That left Dad, Laura, and me. It wasn't much of a feast. I spent most of the week alone in my room reading books on mechanical engineering. I finished my MIT application, after apologizing profusely to Mr. Chu for missing two work shifts without so much as a phone call. He finally forgave me, and agreed to still write me a letter of recommendation.

After it was done, I was so bored I actually rummaged through Dad's old bookshelf, finding an ancient copy of Moby Dick. I would fall asleep at night dreaming I was in the middle of the ocean on a churning ship, the ominous presence of a great whale lurking somewhere beneath me.

Somewhere I couldn't quite reach.

***

"Marina, come back to Earth," my father's voice woke me one morning.

"Hmm?" I asked, sitting up quickly. It took a moment to get my bearings. It was the second time in my life my father had woken me early on a Sunday.

He was sitting on the edge of my bed, his mug of coffee in his hands just like old times. And he was talking to me. Did that mean he forgave me? Or did it mean something worse?

"What is it, Dad?"

"You got an email," he said, holding up his phone to me. I still didn't have a phone, since the pyramid house had been empty when I'd swung by after school one day to check it out. And since my dad no longer trusted me, he had insisted on knowing my passwords so he could check all my messages and my social media postings.

Of course, I'd had very few of any of those things since I'd driven away the only people I had ever cared about.

Still, I cleared my eyes and tried to read the message he was holding up. "What does it mean?" I asked, not able to process anything so early in the morning.

"You have an interview," he smiled, seeming to forget that he was mad at me. "A recruiter from MIT. They say you can pick a place nearby for the meeting. A coffeeshop or something. I was thinking of that place in town with the rooster on the sign."

I nodded, my heart beginning to race. "Yeah," I agreed. "Yeah, that's perfect." I smiled at my dad, and was relieved to see he was smiling back. Then he seemed to remember that we were fighting, and the smile faded temporarily. But I couldn't wait anymore to be forgiven. I threw myself forward into his arms, spilling some of his coffee onto my bed.

"You're gonna be okay, kiddo."

"I love you, Dad."

"You're gonna be great."

****

Just one more week of updates, folks! If you haven't followed me yet, now's a great time to do so. Otherwise you might miss the ending! XO, Rebecca