“Oh, I can’t. I couldn’t . . .” He turned his head again, watching the bus close the door and rumble to life.

“We insist,” Mom said.

Troy looked around at us all. “Thank you for the offer but—”

“Come,” I said. He met my eyes, the word no hanging from his lips, but he turned his head as the bus started moving. He squinted as he watched it pull out of the parking lot and disappear down the road.

“Okay,” he said, sharp and quick. Then he spun around and jogged to his car.

I sat in the backseat with my eyes closed. I could deal with this. With Troy around, I could deal with it. Mom twisted around from the front seat.

“How old is he, Delaney?”

“What?”

“Troy. It just occurred to me that he said he worked. Do you know how old he is?”

“Nineteen.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Who does he live with?”

“I don’t know.” I looked out the window. If she knew he lived alone, I’d never be able to see him unsupervised. I’d never be able to take the car without telling her where I was going. I’d never be able to talk to the only person who knew what was going on with me. I’d be trapped. Hands tied to my bed, drugged to sleep, trapped.

She lowered her voice. “Do we need to have a talk?”

“Oh my God,” I said. Dad groaned.

Mom straightened herself back up. “Well excuse me for saying what we all were thinking.”

“He has roommates.” I said it so low I thought it barely even counted as a lie.

* * *

I replaced the gauze on my hand with a wide Band-Aid. “Paper cut from wrapping,” I explained when Mom pointed it out. We opened gifts under our artificial tree early Christmas morning. I got clothes in the next size up and a new cell phone to replace the one that drowned in Falcon Lake. Dad’s parents sent me fifty bucks, which brought my net worth to fifty-three dollars. Mom wore her new sweater, which didn’t look half-bad. Another small miracle in my life.

I lugged everything up to my room and started the process of putting my new clothes away and coming to terms with the fact that the clothes in the back of the closet didn’t really fit anymore. I pulled them out and threw them on the floor.

I was assessing the heap on the ground when someone knocked.

“Come in.”

Decker swung the door open but stayed in the hallway. I stayed by my closet. “Merry Christmas.” He rocked onto his heels and, after a moment of contemplation, stepped into my room and shut the door.

He stayed near the entrance. “About the other night—”

“Let’s not,” I said. I might say something stupid, and he might say something worse. I just wanted to fix things. I wanted to go back to normal. So I spoke again before he could say anything else. “I got you something. It’s perfect.” I fumbled around under my bed and pulled out his gift.

He sat down on the rumpled comforter and squinted at the wrapping paper. “Did you try to draw something on here?”

“Well, there were Christmas trees, see, that’s the Christmas part. And then there were stars. But I turned them into, you know, Jewish stars. That’s the Hanukkah part.”

“Star of David. Gee, Delaney, I don’t know what to say. You shouldn’t have.”

I settled on the bed, farther away than I’d normally sit. “Just open it already.”

He peeled back a layer of defaced wrapping paper. “It’s a shirt,” I blurted out before he opened the box. “I know how you hate surprises.”

He smiled and unfolded the shirt. “Funny,” he said. It was from the specialty T-shirt shop in the mall, a store I had never set foot in before and probably never would again. The shirt was plain white except for a picture of an overflowing Italian sub with the word “Hero” in bright blue letters above it. He put it on over his sweatshirt.

Then he stood up and reached into his back pocket. “I didn’t know how to wrap this without you ripping them.” He handed me tickets. “Les Mis,” he said. “My mom read in the paper that they were performing in Bangor. She knew it was on our spring reading list.”

We both looked at the abandoned book on my desk. He gave me these tickets because he wasn’t going to read to me anymore. He wasn’t going to sit beside my bed with his feet up and flip pages while I stared at the planets circling my head.

“It’s tomorrow,” he said. “I checked with your parents a few days ago and they said it was okay. I can take you if you want, or you can take someone else.”