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only end in humiliation. Pining for a boy who was completely out of my league—not to mention totally uninterested—was just plain sad and pitiful. I’d worked too hard and come too far to be seen in that light again. I was a different person now. Better. Before I met Emily, I’d spent most of my time playing video games with Nolan or hanging around with kids like me, kids with no boundaries whose parents didn’t give a shit about them. Nolan had his art and his caring, nuclear family to keep him grounded, but what did I have? An immature mother, an absentee father, and no special talents or skills to distract me or set me apart. I had Nolan’s family, sure, but they weren’t really mine. I didn’t technically belong there.
    So I’d found somewhere else to belong. Integrated myself with the smartest and most admired clique in school, changed my image to align with theirs, tricked them into thinking I was confident and stable, and secured a spot within their privileged circle. With them, I felt like I’d finally overcome my past. I wasn’t some pathetic, fatherless girl who felt like trash inside; I was normal, at least on the outside, and I used this illusion to distance myself from who I really was.
    Nolan was the only one who knew the real Lexi Shaw, and that was exactly how I intended to keep it.
     
    Ben and Emily had various commitments to attend to after school, so I usually took the bus home with Nolan in the afternoons. Sometimes I’d go to his house and help him raid the cupboards until his parents got home, and other times, like today, I just wanted to be alone.
    In my room, I lifted Trevor out of his tank and let him coil around my fingers as I straightened the quilt on my bed with my free hand. When it was perfectly neat, I sat down, opened the drawer of my nightstand, and brought out my snake book. The title, Corn Snakes: An Owner’s Guide , hovered over a picture of a snake that looked a lot like Trevor.
    My mother, even if she’d been brave enough to come into my room to snoop through my drawers, would never open a book with a full-color picture of a snake on it. This made it a perfect place to store things like pictures, especially pictures I’d stolen from the shoebox I’d found in her closet when I was snooping through her room.
    At age nine, when I’d first seen these pictures, I’d known immediately that the guy looking back at me was my father. Five years had gone by since I’d last seen him, and my memories of him were fuzzy, but one glimpse of his eyes erased any lingering doubt. They were just like mine.
    Instinctively, I’d hidden the pictures and never told my mother I’d seen them. I knew she wouldn’t like it. She didn’t even like to talk about my father unless it was to remind me that she’d saved us from him and that he was a horrible dad, the kind who didn’t think twice about driving drunk with his baby in the car and spending the rent money on crack. He was so awful, Mom told me, so destroyed by drugs, she’d had no choice but to rip me from my home and move us several thousand miles away to a town where she knew no one except for her old friend Teresa. Once here, my mother made sure the dangerous man who was my father could never follow us or contact us. Restraining order issued, sole custody granted, ties severed. All for our own protection.
    Pictures were destroyed too, except for these two that had somehow survived. In one, my parents sat together on a ratty brown couch, fingers curled around bottles of beer. My mother’s hair was reddish blond, like mine, only she had bangs that defied the laws of gravity. She wore a loose neon-blue shirt that revealed one creamy shoulder and she was smiling, face flushed with happiness. She looked thrilled to be beside him, this guy with the shaggy brown hair and tattoos on his arms and eyes the exact color and shape of my own.
    In the second picture, the same shaggy-haired, tattooed, blue-eyed man was holding me in his arms,