When Mama first told me I’d have to go live with Beth, I thought she was pulling my leg. Until she started crying, that is.

Things had been weird for the past year or so. First, Mama had stopped working as Dr. Parker’s bookkeeper and gotten a new job cleaning houses, though she wouldn’t tell me why. She’d been working for Dr. Parker for years, taking care of all the billing and keeping track of the money for his practice. So I kinda figured something was up when she wasn’t working for him no more. Then she was always on the phone with people, and when she’d hang up, she’d be all upset and teary-eyed. When I asked who she was talking to, she told me it was a lawyer, but she said I didn’t need to worry about it. She started being real forgetful, never remembering when parent-teacher conferences were, or forgetting to go to the grocery store when we ran out of milk or toilet paper or stuff like that. I’d press her about it sometimes, but she just said she was stressed out and that everything was gonna be fine.

“Don’t worry, Bean,” she’d say, stroking the back of my head. “It’s nothing for you to get upset over. It’ll all be okay.”

Turns out, my mama is a liar.

She’d lied to Dr. Parker for months while she was stealing money from him, and she’d lied to me every time she said things would be fine. They weren’t fine at all. The judge had found her guilty in May, and she was going to jail for a whole year, and now she was telling me I had to go live with my stupid older sister who I hadn’t even seen since I was seven.

“I’m sorry, Hadley,” Mama said, her voice muffled by the trembling hands pressed against her face. “I’m so, so sorry. But … but you’ll be okay, I promise. I— Hadley?”

I’d already stormed off. And I made sure to slam my bedroom door real hard, too. She’d lied to me so much. Why should I believe her promises now?

I wasn’t just mad about what she’d done or about having to live with stupid Beth. It was all of it. I’d just finished sixth grade, and I was gonna have to switch schools come August. Beth lived in Kentucky, but I’d spent my whole life in Tennessee. Mama kept saying it was only a three- or four-hour drive, but that’s a long way. Far enough that I didn’t know when I’d see my friends again after I left.

So no, I wasn’t gonna be fine.

I refused to talk to Mama for the next two days, even as she helped me pack up my room. Once Beth came to get me and Mama went to jail to serve her sentence, this house wouldn’t be ours anymore. We were just renters, and that meant our landlady, Mrs. Martindale, would be letting new people move in. My bedroom would be someone else’s bedroom. And I’d be living in a new state, in a new house, going to a new school …

And it was all Mama’s fault.

She tried to trick me into talking to her. She made my favorite dinner—pulled pork sandwiches—and offered to let me stay up late to watch TV, but I didn’t have nothing to say to her. And when Beth showed up in her little blue car to take me away, I walked out the front door without even saying goodbye.

“Hadley,” Mama had called, and I could hear her voice breaking. She was about to cry again. Just like she’d done the day before. And the day before that. “Bean, please …”

Beth glanced at me. She hadn’t said a whole lot since she’d gotten there. But she asked, “Don’t you wanna say goodbye?”

“No.”

I also didn’t wanna hear Beth’s opinion on any of it. She didn’t have a right to talk to me about saying goodbye. She hadn’t said goodbye to me when she’d left us. One day she’d been there, teaching me how to do a French braid and painting my toenails in the bright blues and purples that Mama hated. And the next she’d just been gone. Walked out on us. So who was she to talk about goodbyes?

“But you know Mama won’t be back for a while.”

“I don’t care,” I snapped.

Beth looked over at Mama then. It must’ve been the first time they’d really looked at each other since Beth left us all those years before. But Mama just shook her head. I went and climbed into Beth’s car, slamming the passenger-side door, while she and Mama exchanged a few quiet words. Then Beth got into the driver seat next to me.

“You ready to go?” she asked.

I didn’t answer. What did Beth want me to say? Of course I wasn’t ready. I didn’t wanna go anywhere. I didn’t wanna live with her. I didn’t want any of this. Mama had spent years teaching me the difference between right and wrong, and now she was the one who’d done something real wrong, and I was being punished, too. It wasn’t fair.

Beth started the engine, but before she pulled out, there was a tap on my window. Mama stood outside, gesturing for me to roll the window down.

I didn’t move, so after a minute, Beth rolled it down for me.

“Hadley,” Mama said. Yep. She was crying. I wanna say it didn’t make me feel bad for her. But it did, just a little.

Mama had never been much of a crier before all this. In fact, I’d only seen her cry three times before she stopped working for Dr. Parker. The first time was at Grammy Lora’s funeral, when I was four. The second was two years later, the night the police officer showed up to tell her that Daddy had been in a car accident and wasn’t coming home. And then, of course, the day Beth moved out.

But she’d been crying an awful lot over the past few months, and especially in the two days since she’d told me the judge’s decision. He’d given her a few days to “get her affairs in order”—whatever that meant—before she’d have to go to jail. That’s where she’d be spending the next year because of what she did. And as much as I wanted to punish her, too, seeing her hurt still hurt me a little bit.

“Hadley,” she said again, reaching through the open window to squeeze my shoulder. “I love you, Bean. You know that, right? No matter what happens, I love you so much. And I’m sorry. But I’ll see you soon, okay? I’ll write to you. And Beth can bring you to see me … Right, Beth?”

“Sure,” Beth said. “Any time Hadley wants me to bring her for visitation, I will.”

“You hear that, Bean?”

I didn’t answer.

Mama swallowed hard. “Okay. Well … be careful. Take care of yourself. I love you.”

“I’ll take care of her, Mama,” Beth said. “I promise, she’ll be fine.”

That’s when I decided Beth was probably a liar, too.

I was angry and heartbroken and scared. I didn’t know if I’d ever be “fine” again.

Beth and I finally pulled away. And even though I didn’t want to, I caught myself staring in the side mirror, watching Mama still standing in the driveway, hands over her face, until I couldn’t see her no more.

Which, I guess, didn’t really take all that long.

“So,” Beth said after about an hour of driving. She’d been talking basically nonstop. Just “trying to fill the silence” as Mama would have said. Talking about her job as a dog trainer and her clients and also the dog rescue she’d been working with and the house she lived in and the school where I’d be going in August. Talk, talk, talk. But then her voice had turned a bit nervous. “Mama told me your eyes have been getting worse. Because of the … shoot. What was it called again? RP stands for … uh …”

“Retinitis pigmentosa,” I muttered. I hated those two words. They sounded harsh and ugly, and I’d heard them a million times in the past couple years. Usually by eye doctors who said it in that serious I-have-bad-news voice.

“That’s it,” Beth said. “Thank you. Anyway, I was talking to Mama about it, and I got to thinking, maybe it’s about time you start making some preparations. For when it gets worse, you know? Mama said she’d been meaning to look into different programs or classes that could help you, but with everything going on she hadn’t had a chance. So I did some research, and we could get you a teacher. Someone to show you how to walk with a cane and cross streets safely. That kind of thing. We might even be able to find you a Braille teacher if that was something you’d be interested in. What do you think?”

“I don’t need a teacher.”

“Oh.”

“I can get around fine. I can see fine.”

“Well, sure, maybe for now,” Beth said as she switched on the windshield wipers. It had started raining. Because the day wasn’t awful enough, I guess. “But, Hadley, it’s going to get worse, and it can’t hurt to be prepared. Learning some new things might even be fun. You might make new friends.”

“Not interested.”

“Okay,” she said, with a tone that told me I was clearly testing her patience. “I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want. But it’s something to think about. I just … I wanna be helpful.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want her bringing it up, either. What did she know about how much I could see or what was good for me? Nothing. She didn’t know nothing.

That sure didn’t stop her from trying, though. We’d gotten to her house that afternoon, and I’d pretty much been shut up in her guest bedroom ever since.

She’d tried to get me to unpack.

“It’ll make you feel more at home, Hadley.”

She’d tried to get me to eat more.

“You’ll feel better with a full stomach, Hadley.”

She’d tried to get me to go outside and help her with her flower garden.

“We could all use some fresh air sometimes, Hadley.”

It’s been two weeks, and my stupid sister refuses to just leave me alone. All I wanna do is stay in bed watching YouTube videos on my phone, texting my friends back in Tennessee, and eating potato chips. But instead, she insists on dragging me all over this new town with her.

“It’s okay to be angry and upset,” she told me a few days ago. “You’ve got every right to be. But this isn’t healthy, Hadley. I’m worried about you. We gotta find something—something you enjoy. Something that’ll help you cope with being here.”

I ain’t so sure Lila is exactly what she meant.