Prairie made sure I had everything I needed to fit in. My closet was full of clothes from department stores and expensive boutiques. I had sandals in every color, to show off my pedicure. I had my own bathroom and enough cosmetics and hair products to fill all the cabinets. We had cable and highspeed Internet and great speakers.
No one could tell that three months ago I’d been a freak, an outcast, an orphan in thrift-store rags. A girl nobody wanted, least of all my drug-dealing grandmother, who was now buried in an unmarked grave, courtesy of the citizens of Gypsum.
“So it’s a date, then,” Prairie said, giving me a quick squeeze. She looked so pleased that I didn’t say what I’d been trying to find words for: that maybe we could make it just the two of us. Just for a little longer.
I wanted-needed-to be accepted by Jess and Charlotte. Yet there was a part of me that wasn’t ready. Not by a long shot.
2
WHEN TUESDAY EVENING rolled around, I let Prairie down.
I waited until she got home to tell her. I told myself it was because she never took her phone into the lab where they conducted the experiments-she was part of a team doing some kind of research with high magnetic fields, and they couldn’t take anything electronic into the lab with them-but the truth was that I could have left a message on her work phone, or her cell phone. I knew she checked both the minute she got out of the lab-after she checked the other phone, the one hidden in a pocket in the bottom of her purse.