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history and writing, she was terrible at math and science, and with Mom working the evening shift at the hospital laundry, Shandell lost her tutor. From the first day that she failed a quiz in Algebra 2, Shandell felt herself sinking fast without Mom to teach her the lessons. By the timemidterm grades came out, she was drowning with no lifeboat in sight. They couldn’t afford a tutor, and her teacher could not spare the time to work with individual students. At this point, her high school diploma was in jeopardy.
    And if that wasn’t bad enough, there was her stepdad. She raked her silky black hair away from her forehead and tried to let the neat rows of corn beyond the window chase the dark thoughts of her stepfather from her mind. Thinking about Phil made her want to cry, despite the Amish farmland, bursting with the colors of springtime. She had enjoyed her time out in the bright countryside, a nice break from the shadowed living room where Phil carped at her from the blue light of the television screen.
    What’s wrong with you? You can’t even pass dummy math
.
    With grades like that, you’ll never amount to anything
.
    “Aw, come on.” Gary slung his arm around her in a conciliatory gesture. “Don’t forget why you wanted to leave home in the first place.”
    “I haven’t forgotten.” The images of her stepfather passed out on the couch and her mother raging through tears were branded in her memory. After the terrible fight with Mom, she’d wanted nothing more than to be far away from home. But now they were out of money and running out of gas. Twice she had washed her hair in public restroom sinks, and sponge baths left her feeling grungy. She just wanted to go home. “It was fun in the beginning, Gar, but you said it yourself. Our plan didn’t work out. Your sister couldn’t put us up, and you can’t really live in a car. We need to go home.”
    “You can’t go back there.” His voice was soft, but there was an insidious edge that was beginning to wear on her. “Your mother told you to go, didn’t she?”
    Chelsea Darby had told her daughter to leave, but Shandell didn’t think she meant it, not really.
    “I already missed three days of school,” she told Gary. “If I miss too much, I won’t graduate.”
    “Too bad, so sad. You’re old enough to drop out of school, and what would you do with a high school diploma, anyway? There are no jobs for people like us anymore. We have to blaze our own trails. Do something different.”
    Gary considered himself to be industrious, but at twenty-one he was three years older than Shandell and still didn’t have much to show for it. He had dropped out of school when he was seventeen and taken a job with a moving company in Baltimore. But there were slow periods when they didn’t need him. Like now.
    When they’d left Baltimore, she’d thought that Gary might be her savior; now she recognized that he was an ordinary thief. Twice they had bolted from gas stations without paying for the gas, and she realized that the hot food from the convenience store was probably stolen, too. The excitement of the road trip had soured into a bad dream, one of those feverish dreams where Shandell kept climbing a mountain but every time she looked up, she was miles from the top. And when she looked down, the steep drop paralyzed her with fear.
    She wanted out of the road trip.
    “Maybe I want to do something different,” she said, “but just back in Baltimore. It would be nice to sleep in a bed again. I’ll be better at blazing a new trail with a good night’s sleep.”
    “You can be such a dweeb. But okay. We’ll head back after dark. I just want to hit a few more of these Amish towns. Lancaster County is full of them.”
    “They are really quaint,” she said, though she was surprised that Gary was into patchwork quilts and buggies.
    When they passed over the rise, the road descended steadily into a green valley flanked by farms on either side. The dark road