PROLOGUE

The night before Amelia Anne Richardson bled her life away on a parched dirt road outside of town, I bled out my dignity in the back of a pickup truck under a star-pricked sky.

The back of a pickup truck. A country song, jukebox cliché. I was eighteen.

Afterward, the late-night mosquitoes floated out of the dark to settle on my thighs. Hovering and sucking at my skin, drawn in by the thick, mingling scents of sex and sweat and summer.

I swatted them away and lay back alone on the oil-stained steel, legs twisted into the scratchy cheap fabric of a K-Mart sleeping bag, propped dizzily on my elbows, examining the moisture collecting under me by the weak glow of the moon and the dashboard lights. James was a silhouette in the cab, nonchalantly smoking and tapping his knuckles against the window glass. His sweat dried on my skin. The sound of blood in my ears, rushing and receding with each breath, pulsed in time with the flare at the end of his cigarette. He inhaled, the cherry glowing, illuminating his mouth. His teeth were slick pearls behind the filter.

That afternoon, I’d walked across a rickety platform to collect my high school diploma from the principal—a beaming man with sweat-darkened patches on his collared shirt, a man whose mouth stretched with broad, smiling pride when the highest achievers of the graduating class laid one hand on the rolled slip of paper and the other in his outstretched palm. Hearty handshakes all around for the top kids: the bright future–havers, the scholarship winners, the team captains, the college bound.

He nodded at me, the salutatorian, the aspiring lawyer, bound for a high-powered life in a city far away. “I know you’ll go far,” he said as he pumped my hand.

But then, after the photos were taken and cheeks kissed and polyester gowns shucked off like a snake’s skin, I’d gone only as far as the outskirts of town, where James turned the truck down a rutted road through the woods, into an open field, and parked with a jolt on the rough grass.

Parked under a wide-open sky pricked by thousands of stars.

Parked his hand between my legs and half threw me out the tiny back window and into the flatbed, where my feet flew over my head and I scrabbled for purchase on slippery steel. I peered back at him; he smiled, shrugged.

“Ha,” he said.

“You can’t throw the salutatorian around like that,” I said.

A sleeping bag came through the window next, and then James himself, all long legs and arms. He was long, lanky, the most spiderlike boy I had ever seen. His Adam’s apple bobbed on his fleshless neck. Skinny wrists gave way to huge, bony hands with knuckles that gnarled and knobbed like an old man’s. He exited the cab, his clothes whispering against the glass. I lay down.

Graduation night, too-smooth boyfriend with a beater pickup and no diploma of his own, the sky full of stars and the night full of chirping crickets—a perfect, planned-out, teenaged tableau. This wasn’t the first time I’d been here, not even the first time I’d thought that I was too tired, the truck bed too dirty, but gone ahead anyway, letting him groan and shudder on top of me until he’d finished and lay his damp, musty hair against my chest. I liked the sex, sometimes. But more than that, I liked the closeness of afterward, the way his skinny arms would wrap around me and we’d lie, tangled and warm, breathing moist air into each other’s mouth. And this day, they’d told us, was ours. A step into the future. And now, right now, a moment for two bright young things on the verge of the rest of their lives to stop, strip, and spend one more night—one more hot, beautiful, stagnant summer—together in the back of a pickup.

James straddled my hips, grappling with the glinting button on my jeans, baring my legs and belly to the breathless openness of the blue-black sky. His shoulder pressed into my open mouth, and I could taste the damp cloth of his T-shirt against my tongue.

It was quick.

He didn’t say a word, didn’t make a sound, and neither did I. Not until, with his sweat still drying on my skin and his scent still draped over my body, he pulled back and looked down at me. In the dark, his features were nothing but vague lights and shadows.

His voice came from somewhere above me.

“This is the last time we’ll ever do this.”

I laughed at first.

“We’ve got all summer,” I started to say. All summer to be here, be together. The words died on my lips as he looked back at me.

“We’re done,” he said. “This is done.”

I inhaled, one deep breath. Our eyes met. His were opaque. Mine were swimming. When he moved away, I only knew by the sudden sensation of air—cool and empty, moving over my thighs.

It was over in minutes, seconds, in the flutter of an eyelid. I gaped up at the place where his face had been moments before, blinking, seeing only the stars partially obliterated by a thick piece of hair that had fallen over my face. I thought about crying—thought about screaming, begging—but my throat had seamed itself shut. My jeans were twisted into an impossible knot around my knee.

I disentangled myself from the twisted sleeping bag. Kicked the crumple of denim off my leg, thinking to myself, it’s a little late for dignity. I laid back on my elbows and watched James. Watched him wrap his sensual mouth around one cigarette after another. Watched the sweat and slick evaporate from my thighs.

* * *

Later, I would sink down into a bathtub full of scalding hot water, lay my swollen eyelids against the cool porcelain, and shake so hard that my bones made soft clinking sounds against the tub. Later, I would toss back four painkillers against my clenching throat, and let my thoughts ramble and circle back again to James’s heavy-lidded eyes and hard, clutching hands. To an article I’d once read that included the phrase, “For many, the emotional trauma of a broken heart can manifest as real, physical pain”—and that I thought, at the time, was the stupidest thing I had ever heard.

In the corner, above the sink, the small black second hand of the clock silently ticked away toward midnight.

It was still graduation day.