Remember When **Under MAJOR Editing**

Chapter 20

Leaving his house,I felt seventeen times as lost as I'd felt Tuesday night when I dropped him off at the wharf. I couldn't go home. I couldn't go to the mall because it would be closing by the time I arrived. And I needed to make the most of the Benz while I had it. My dad would come home to reclaim it the day after tomorrow and I'd be without wheels until further notice. Grounded, as surely as if I'd looked for invisible tape in his office.

I switched on the GPS and typed in Seattle.

The drive was long and dark and lonely and blank with no exit for miles on Interstate 40 toward Albuquerque. My body was dead tired but my brain was alert, energized by anger at everything Dade had said.

Was he a liar?

Thinking back, I couldn't put my finger on an actual lie he'd told me.  Well, he'd fudged when he explained where he and Mike were going when we wrecked, but even then he'd constructed a lie as close to the truth as he could manage on the fly.  He wasn't so much a liar as a with holder of pertinent information.  For a talkative boy he could really keep his own counsel.

Except about Zack, of course. Did I really know in my heart that Zack was cheating on me with Stephanie Wetzel?

There certainly was evidence he was growing closer to Stephanie and pulling away from me. But when I asked my heart what it thought, my heart didn't respond. It didn't even speed up at the thought of him cheating on me. It raced when my mind wandered through the future, wondering who Dade would end up with if my fate with Zack was sealed, as Dade had said. I couldn't stand the thought of Dade tossing back his head and laughing with another girl.

Had Dade and I used a condom?

Surely we had. As he'd told Officer Elks, he never did anything foolish. Of course, he'd said this facetiously. Fuck.

And this released a flood of questions about the details of what we'd done. Who made the first move? How did we end up going so far so fast? How exactly did my earring catch on his zipper, hello? Did I enjoy it? Did he? I could guess the answers to the last two questions by the way we'd acted when we wrecked. We'd definitely enjoyed it. But the rest . . . I had lost my memory. He would keep his forever. It wasn't fair.

Somewhere between Albuquerque and El Paso, on a pitch-black stretch of highway, I realized the oysters had settled in my stomach and pumped salt and aphrodisiac into my veins until my mouth was on fire. I was rubbing my lips with my fingertips, driving in the wrong direction. And now I was two and a half hours form Dade.

In the dead of night I eased the Benz back down Dade's drive, stopped in the middle of the causeway, and killed the headlights. I'd feared the salty dogs would still be up and I'd be caught with no safe way out. But the pack had dispersed for the night.

I pressed the button for Dade's cell and listened to it ring.  What if he didn't pick up? I would go crazy wondering whether he'd turned off his phone again or he was watching the screen, refusing to talk to me. Either way, if I didn't see him tonight, I would spontaneously combust, I knew it. I felt heavy from pressure, desperate to get out from under it. At the same time, electricity zinged through me. My every thought zeroed in on the basement windows of the house, his room. I needed release from this. I couldn't go on this way.

"Mya. Where are you?" Through the phone, his calm voice had that edge I remembered from the wreck. He thought I was in trouble.

It hadn't occurred to me that I would scare him when I called. For the first time I began to doubt this plan. The pressure and the electricity drove me forward. "I'm in your driveway."

"Give me two minutes." The phone clicked dead.

The basement windows glowed with light. Then went dark.