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I fork up some eggs and look across the table at Wendy, who’s now not meeting my eyes.

“School, huh?” I say. I guess it is getting to be the end of summer. I hadn’t really thought about it. I haven’t really thought about school since I was in school, and I haven’t been in school since, what, like eighth grade, maybe? Not like I spent a lot of time in class even when I was there.

Wendy just slices her pancakes into smaller and smaller squares, saying nothing.

“I bet you like school,” I say, just to test the waters. “Lots of books, right?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Wendy lifts a shoulder, stabbing at some bright red pancake, but not eating it. “My last one was kind of shitty.”

“Wendy!” I cry through a mouthful of eggs that I quickly swallow. Damn, I should have asked for hot sauce. “Don’t say that. Say…” I try to think of a better word. “…crappy.”

“Ugh, fine,” Wendy says, bugging her eyes out. “My last one was kind of crappy. I don’t think⁠—”

Again, she stops herself short, like she did in the library. She turns her face to the window and stares at it, clearly just not wanting to meet my eyes, because you can’t see through the damn thing.

I put my fork down. Just listening.

“I don’t think I ever want to go back,” she says after a minute, quickly and low.

“What?” I say. “To school?”

Shit, I hadn’t even thought of that. But she can’t not be in school, right? No, she should go to school. School is good. School is where you learn how to be an upstanding citizen and contribute to society and all that kind of stuff that she’s definitely not going to learn from any of us.

But if she’s with us…

…how’s that all going to work exactly? The school part?

My one bite of eggs sits like a rock in my stomach.

“Yeah,” Wendy says. “Or, well, no, not exactly.” She sighs and her eyes drift back to me. “Like no, I don’t want to go back to that school. There were cigarette butts in the drinking fountain,” she says, lowering her voice. “Like the kids were smoking them and leaving them there.”

“Ew,” I say, because that genuinely is gross.

“Right. But, I mean…it’s more like…” She folds her arms into her lap and suddenly looks very, very small. Like the ten-year-old she is, not the smart-alecky know-it-all, almost-a-teenager kid that she acts like most of the time now. “I mean I don’t want to not be with you guys.”

It’s such a simple thing to say, and yet it honestly kind of breaks my heart. Because it’s so nice. Because it’s cool. Because, well, when has anyone ever chosen me, chosen us? When was the last time a smart, reasonable person decided, Hey, yeah, that group of guys is the one I want to throw my lot in with?

No sooner do I ask myself, though, than I realize: Tink.

And, well, she’s pretty great too. In a different way than Wendy, but in a lot of the same ways too.

“And I don’t—” Wendy swallows. “I don’t think I even really care about finding out who hurt my brothers,” she says. “Like, not if it’s gonna make things harder or worse or get you guys in trouble.” She looks up at me with big, wide eyes, and for a minute I wonder if she’s gonna cry.

I don’t want Wendy to cry.

“Okay,” I say. “Then—okay. We won’t.”

“Really?” Wendy says. “But Tink⁠—”

“Tink just wants to make you happy,” I say. Or to make it up to you, I think. I shake my head. “We all want you to be happy. So if that’s what you want—” I pick up my fork again to push some of my hash browns around the plate.

“It’s what I want,” Wendy says, firmly. “I don’t want you guys…I don’t want the same thing to happen to you, okay?”

Now there are definitely tears in her eyes.

Jesus.

“It won’t,” I tell her. “It won’t, I promise, okay, Wendy? We’ll back off. And if you want to stay with us, then we’ll—I don’t know—figure it out.”