Crap, I hope Mrs. B will spend some time with me today.

I read a few pages, willing Bane out of my mind. Sometimes Mrs. B was clear as the August sky. I confided in her, more often than I’d like to admit. It was easier than talking to Mayra, my therapist, because Mayra always took notes and made suggestions. Mrs. Belfort very rarely remembered our conversations.

Twenty minutes after I walked in, Imane stepped out of the dining room with her arms behind her back, her expression downcast.

“I’m sorry, Jesse. Not today. Fred wasn’t…” Her throat bobbed. She gnawed on the inside of her cheek, unable to look me in the eye. “Fred wasn’t feeling well.”

I stood up, heading for the door when Mrs. Belfort came out of the dining room, hugging the doorframe to support herself. She looked like a stranger, her eyes wearing an expression I’d never seen before. Clarity. “You can’t be afraid of love, my dear. It’s like being afraid of death. It is inevitable.”

Love is like death. It’s inevitable.

The words chased my thoughts long after I’d left Mrs. B’s house. It was a good thing I was going for a run, because I needed to declutter my head after the weird day I’d had.

Anything north of the witching hour was my favorite.

Time soaked into your skin like a kiss at three o’clock in the morning, slow and seductive. I was always awake at night—that’s when the nightmares crept in. They were so bad that at some point, I stopped falling asleep. Catnaps during the day kept me going. But sleeping through a whole night? Yeah. No, thanks. That was practically inviting a rerun of The Incident. In loop.

I must have been under some kind of a spell tonight. I felt brave from talking to a stranger—to a male stranger—and the limitations and red lines I’d made for myself faded to the background. I shoved my earbuds into my ears. “Time to Dance” by Panic! At The Disco blasted in my ears as I headed toward El Dorado’s track at 3:00 a.m. I had a finger Taser and a little Swiss Army knife shoved inside my sock. Plus, it was a gated neighborhood, with patrols driving around in carts every hour. I took my Labrador, Shadow, with me because he practically begged when I was at the door. He was probably the only creature alive I still cared about pleasing.

The Untouchable, I thought as my feet hit the concrete trail, Shadow on a leash, lagging behind me like the fourteen-year-old veteran that he was. It had a nice ring to it. Even I had to admit it.

Only it wasn’t a compliment. I’d gotten the nickname because I wouldn’t allow anyone to touch me. Ever. At all. Thwack, thwack, thwack. I ran like my life depended on it. Three years ago, it had. And I’d failed. They’d caught me.

I’d been running ever since, twice a day. Five miles on the edges of the gated neighborhood I’d lived in.

Running to exhaust myself, physically and mentally, so I could sleep.

Running so I wouldn’t have to stand still, and ponder, and think, and crumble.

Running from my problems, and my reality, and the emptiness that nibbled at the edges of my gut, like acid. Burning, eating, destroying.

My routine had somewhat put me in an oxygen-thief status. Even I had to admit that my life was aimless. I slept during the days and lived in the dead of the night. I worked out obsessively in the basement and got out of Pam and Darren’s hair as much as humanly possible. They begged for me to come back to the world, but I never did. Then they took my treadmill, so I started running outside. They threatened to cut my allowance if I didn’t get a job, so I simply stopped spending money. I read books instead, took Shadow on long strolls, and lived off the odd Kit Kat bar, mainly to keep myself alive. Sometimes I paid Mrs. B a visit. I never left El Dorado with the exception of weekly visits to my therapist, Mayra.

I’d been with Mayra ever since I was twelve, and can honestly say she hadn’t contributed in making me feel better or reach a fundamental conclusion even once. The only reason I kept going was because Pam had threatened to kick me out if I stopped, and I actually believed her.

People, as a concept, were starting to feel blurry and unfamiliar. Fuzzy, like black and white static flakes playing on an old-school TV. I’d been caught off guard when Bane started talking to me, because no one ever did.

The soles of my feet burned, and my thighs quivered with the strain I was putting them through. I’d always been athletic, but it was only after what had happened to me senior year that I became obsessed with running, and not in a good way. Pam—she didn’t like it when I called her Mom, claimed she looked too young for the title—said I looked “hot” since The Incident, and I tried not to hate her every time that she did.

Jesse, look at your legs. That’s your silver lining right there. Just open up and try to be less weird, and everything will be fine.

Running at buttcrack o’clock meant it was only Shadow and me on the track. Just as well. Whenever people recognized me, they either looked at me like I was trash, or averted their gaze, making sure I didn’t see the pity in their eyes. Loneliness was an old friend. So much so that, ironically, it became my company.

Shadow was beginning to pant loudly behind me, so I stopped, bending down and stretching my hamstrings, my fingers pressing my toes.

“Take your time, Old Sport.” I patted his head, waiting for the next song on my iPod to start.

“Jesse? Jesse Carter?” a woman chirped behind me. My heart slammed against my ribcage at the sudden noise. I whipped my head around, tearing the earbuds from my ears. Wren, a girl I went to school with, waved at me as she jogged toward my spot. She was wearing clubbing attire consisting of a little red dress that could barely cover a freckle, let alone the two silicone balloons she’d been gifted on her seventeenth birthday. She wore slippers and looked drunk, which made me wonder what idiot had let this twenty-year-old girl party at their bar until the middle of the night. I wheezed out the remainder of the oxygen. Wren lived in El Dorado. She’d probably been stumbling home, saw me, and decided to say hi. Why she decided that was beyond me.

“I knew it was you,” she gasped, aligning her drunken, loose body in front of my tense, anxious one. “Ohmigosh, I told them it was you.”

Them? Who were they? I was about to ask when Wren decided to abuse the nonexistent word ‘ohmigosh’ once again. “Ohmigosh, and I can’t believe your dog is still alive. He must be, like, twenty or something, right?”

The old Jesse would tell her not everyone was as young as her new tits and nose. The new Jesse avoided confrontation at almost any cost. Wren sized me up, raking her eyes over me, head-to-toe. Her gaze was like a bright projector aimed at a hibernating animal. I wanted to coil into myself and die.

She smirked. “You look hot, Jesse. Are you on the Dukan Diet or something?”

I rubbed Shadow behind the ears and resumed my jogging, hoping she’d get the hint and give up on the one-sided conversation. To my disappointment, she sprinted forward, catching my step.

“Don’t be a bitch. Share your secret.”

Get gang raped by your boyfriend and his friends. That would either make you lose your appetite completely or eat your feelings away.

“I’m not on any diet,” I finally gritted out.

“Well, you look great! I mean, you’ve always looked great. Obvs,” she abbreviated the word ‘obviously,’ because it was just too long for her holy mouth. For the first three years of high school, I’d been one of the popular girls. The designated queen bee. Devastating blue eyes and legs for miles. They called me Snow White: dark hair, fair skin, witch-bitch mother. It helped that I was born and raised in Anaheim. My mom was freshly wed to an oil tycoon, and everyone at All Saints High had thought I was ghetto. “Classy, but ghetto,” Emery corrected whenever someone asked me if I’d ever seen someone getting stabbed or shot. After The Incident, my status took a nosedive. In fact, by the end of senior year, I’d been outranked by pretty much everyone, including the toilet seats and peeling cafeteria tables of All Saints High. Wren and her friends were the first to cough the word ‘slut’ in the hallways, the first to whine about STDs when asked to take a seat next to me in chemistry or calc.

“That really means a lot,” I said sarcastically, refraining from asking her about her life. I didn’t want to know.

“I wish I had it in me to put so much effort into my body.” Wren sighed dramatically, barely keeping up with my pace. The sound of her after-party flip-flops slapping against the ground made me want to tear my hair from my skull. “But I’m just so busy with school, and friends, and my new boyfriend. You know I’m dating Justin Finn now, right?”

I didn’t know that. I’d pretty much stopped talking to the entire world after what happened. The only thing I remembered about Justin Finn was the way his brother Henry’s teeth had felt against my thigh when I’d finally come to, dizzy and nauseous, after they’d beaten me senseless. His laughter into my sex as he tasted me, defenseless, against my will. I remembered it so clearly, in fact, I could still feel him on my body, even after two years and countless showers. I bit my lip hard, stifling a scream.

They’re not here.

They can’t hurt you.

“What the hell are you doing here, Wren? It’s three in the morning.”

“Aw. She talks! Exciting.” She golf-clapped on another vicious smile. “So what have you been doing with your life?”

The idea that I could be in real danger trickled into my consciousness slowly. Wren’s house was on the other side of the neighborhood. The track was located by a small park with swings and a slide. Teenagers often came here at night to get tanked during summer vacations. That meant that she wasn’t alone. Already, I had the disadvantage.

“You look a little pale, Jesse. Or maybe it’s just you never leave the house.” She snort-laughed. I picked up my pace, watching from my peripheral as her arms flailed beside her body with exhaustion. Shadow wheezed behind me. I inwardly begged him not to hate me for what I was doing. But I was panicking. I wanted to flee back home, but who the hell knew what waited for me by the playground?