“Oh, Mina.” She sighed. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that it’s out.” Her words sounded more resigned than surprised. “What happened?”

“Jesse . . . the kid I work with, the one who was there that night I met Iris. He overheard two girls talking about it at Frankie’s. He said that the girl who did most of the talking had dark hair up in a ponytail. And she knew everything, Mom. She knew I was claiming to be a virgin. So I assumed it had to be Izzy, right? Who else?” I lifted my head up, meeting my mom’s wide, somber eyes. “So I went over there this morning and freaked out on her, accused her of betraying me and a whole lot of other nasty things that I probably shouldn’t have said. She told me that it wasn’t her, that she hadn’t told anyone. And as unlikely as that seems, I still think I might believe her . . .”

My voice faded away as I turned toward the window, staring out at the sunny fields next to our house as my mind scrambled for new answers. “But if it wasn’t Izzy, who else could it have been? No one else makes sense. But it doesn’t even matter, I guess, because either way it’s out there now. If Jesse knows about it and he doesn’t have a single real friend at Green Hill, then everyone in the entire town will know soon enough, and there’s nothing I can do to change that.”

“Oh, Mina, I’m so, so . . .” my mom started, but she was cut off by a loud thudding noise from across the room. We both looked over to see Gracie on the floor, slumped into a tight ball in the hallway just beyond the kitchen entrance.

“Gracie?” we both said at the same time, kicking the chairs back as we ran over to her.

“Gracie, sweetie, what’s wrong?” I asked, kneeling down low to get closer. I reached out to smooth her tangled blonde curls. “Are you hurt?”

She said nothing back, and though I couldn’t actually hear her crying, I could feel her little body trembling under my hand.

My mom crouched down next to me. “Baby, you need to tell us what’s wrong. Please. Sit up and talk to us.” She latched on to each of Gracie’s balled fists and slowly started tugging, urging her up.

After a few seconds Gracie gave in and let my mom lift her like a puppet, but she yanked her hands free as soon as she was upright. She pulled her knees in tight and stared down at the floor, refusing to look up at either of us. This wasn’t her typical fighting style. Gracie got angry and upset, of course, like any seven-year-old girl, but usually the more upset she got, the more she talked. Gracie never had any trouble telling us exactly what was on her mind.

“Gracie. Look at me.” I put my palm under her chin and gently tilted her face so that I could see her eyes. As soon as she looked up at me, she broke, a sudden stream of tears pouring down her cheeks. “I . . . I . . .” she stuttered, her porcelain face flushed with the effort.

“I did it!” The confession exploded from her mouth in a scream. “It was me! It was me, Mina. Me, me, me, me,” she yelled, slapping frantically at her legs each time she repeated herself, the hits getting harder and louder as she went along.

I grabbed her wrists to make her stop. “I don’t understand, Gracie, what did you . . .” The question froze on my lips. A hot tingling knot gnawed at my stomach, and I dropped her hands. “No,” I said, and gasped, putting both palms on the floor in front of me to steady myself.

“No, Gracie,” Mom said. “You didn’t. It wasn’t you. It couldn’t have been . . .”

I watched my mom’s face as everything clicked into place, the open-mouthed shock replacing any lingering confusion.

“How could you?” I yelled.

Gracie bit down on her lips and pressed her hands against her ears to block me out.

“Damn it, Gracie, answer me!”

She lurched away from me, her beautiful blue eyes wide with fear. Guilt instantly washed over every last bit of me. I hadn’t meant to sound so cold and demanding, not to my little sister. Not to my Gracie.

“Mina,” my mom said, a note of warning in her voice.

“I’m sorry.” I reached out to touch Gracie’s cheek. “I am. I didn’t mean to yell at you. You just really surprised me. I need you to explain this to me.”

“I told Ava,” she said, her voice tiny and fragile. Ava was her best friend, had been since the first day of kindergarten. “I know you told me not to tell anybody, and I wasn’t going to, I promise. I was just so excited! And I hate secrets. I don’t keep secrets from Ava, not ever. I wanted her to know how special you were, too. It was like something burning up in me like a fire, and I had to let it out.”

She was looking right at me while she talked, and even then I could still see the pride glowing though her red-rimmed eyes. I wanted to sweep her into a hug and tell her that it was all okay, that she had done the right thing. But I couldn’t. I was still too numb to move or speak.

“I made her swear on her grammy’s grave that she wouldn’t tell anyone. That’s what she always swears on when she really means it, and she’s never gone against a swear before. But I guess she couldn’t keep this secret either. I want to be mad at her, but I did the same thing she did. We both told a secret we weren’t supposed to tell. We’re both bad people.” Her eyes welled up again, and she looked away.

“But, Gracie,” my mom said, “I still don’t understand. How did telling Ava spread the story to girls in Mina’s school?”

“Arielle,” I said, the name dropping from my lips the second the pieces all lined up in my mind. Ava—Ava Fowler. “Ava told her cousin Arielle. Arielle has dark hair, too.” I always forgot that Ava and Arielle were related, because the two were so different, so separate in my mind. But that was why Arielle had been watching me. She knew. And she would do anything to make my life harder—anything that would make her look better than me in Nate’s eyes.

Shame squeezed my lungs, cutting off my breath.

Izzy hadn’t told my secret after all. Izzy had been loyal. And I’d screamed in her face, said the worst things I could have imagined saying to her, things that I’d known weren’t true but had said anyway. Just to hurt her. And it had worked.

I stood up. I needed to be somewhere by myself, away from Gracie.

Gracie rushed to her feet, too, and wrapped her arms around my waist. “Do you hate me, Mina?” she asked, the question muffled against my sweatshirt.

“I don’t hate you. Of course I don’t hate you,” I said, hanging my arms loosely around her shoulders. “I just need to be alone right now. I need time for everything to settle in my mind, okay?”

She nodded and released me. I turned away and picked up my purse from the table, still unsure of where I was going but knowing I couldn’t face Gracie’s eyes.

“I’ll be back in a little,” I said to my mom, who was still sitting cross-legged on the floor. She looked bleary-eyed and exhausted, blinking at her two daughters as if she’d been woken up in the middle of a bad dream and still couldn’t sort out fiction from reality.

I flinched and turned my back to her. I was the one putting my mom through this—it was my decision that was making her life so difficult.

I could only hope now that I was right, that what I’d told Jesse last night had been true: I’d made the best choice.

That there had been no other answer.

• • •

I hadn’t expected to be back in the tree house again so soon.

But after sitting in my parked car in the driveway for twenty minutes with absolutely no idea where to go and less than a quarter tank of gas to get me there, the woods just outside my window seemed to be the easiest solution.

I was sprawled on my back on the dusty, splintered floor, torturing myself by reading through old notes from Nate that I had kept stuffed in the glove compartment of my car, a scattered collection of ripped notebook pages and ratty old napkins that I had expected to treasure for the rest of my life. Some were tedious, practical check-ins he’d snuck to me in the middle of class and probably didn’t merit the storage space—Meet me at my locker after third period and Need a ride home?—but others were much sweeter, more personal messages that seemed to reach out from the page and punch me in the gut every time I read back over them. We had written to each other as if we had all the time in the world. There was so much love on the pages, and so much trust in our future. Gone now. All of it. At least for Nate. I still had love, and I probably always would. He was every first for me, except for the one that would have changed all this. The one that Nate and Izzy and the rest of the world thought mattered most.