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country songs I didn’t think I liked. Well, I had two gifts, really. The second was being attracted to a certain kind of guy who only brought me orgasms and heartache.
    Max in the backseat seemed proof of that.
    Clearly, in the gift lottery I got total duds.
    Jennifer, on the other hand, won that lottery. She was the gifted one. Super smart. Like off the charts smart.
    When she was nine, Dad loaded us all into his truck with the crappy heater and the broken passenger door that had to be tied shut and drove us three hours into Madison to one of the swankier taverns for a trivia night.
    Jen—even at nine years old—had been a total world geography ringer, and we went home with five hundred dollars.
    The fall after Dad died, I tried to get Jennifer into the gifted charter school in Wilomet.
    That’s how we got found.
    “Hey, what the hell with that noise?” It was Max in the backseat and I turned down the music.
    “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
    “You can’t sing. In case you were wondering.”
    “Not true,” I said. “I am a karaoke champ and I have the medals to prove it.”
    Another thing Jennifer loved. Karaoke. Well, I loved it, too.
    “Where are we?”
    “Middle of nowhere. On our way to Aunt Fern.”
    “Tell me about this Aunt Fern.”
    I haven’t spoken to her in seven years and there’s a chance she won’t let us in.
    “She can take the bullet out of your leg, what else matters?”
    “Can we trust her?”
    “Like will she turn you in?”
    He was silent, and I glanced in the rearview mirror to meet his eyes. He wasn’t scared; I wasn’t sure Max could be scared. That part of his humanity might have been burned right out of him. Removed at birth by the Skulls. Who knows how that shit worked.
    Not scared, no. But worried.
    “She won’t turn you in.”
    “What about you?”
    That was a surprise. “What about me?”
    “I wasn’t the one with the bombs.”
    “Yeah, I’m not planning on telling her about that.”
    “You planning on telling her about your sister and Lagan?”
    Shame tore through me, so fast and so hard I couldn’t suck in a breath.
    Anger was a predictable comfort and I dove into its arms.
    “Why do you care?”
    “I don’t. But if someone is calling the cops, I don’t want to be around.”
    She wouldn’t turn me in. Aunt Fern wasn’t like that. She was stern and judgmental and she didn’t like me much, but we came from the same place and that mattered.
    “Fern won’t go to the cops.”
    “Good.”
    I thought he’d fallen asleep again it was so quiet and I was about to turn the music back up, when I heard his croaky, beat-up voice.
    “Listen. You need to promise me something,” he said. “If anything goes wrong—”
    “Like what?” I was being obtuse. Willfully. It was a habit.
    “Joan.”
    “Nothing is going to go wrong.”
    “There’s a shit-ton of stuff that could go wrong and you know it.”
    I probably knew a few ways that things could go wrong that he didn’t even know about. Because of Fern. Because of me.
    Because he was my Plan B.
    “Just…keep me away from my brother. Keep all this shit away from my brother.”
    “Max—”
    “Promise.” I was silent and he punched the back of my seat. “Don’t fuck me on this!”
    “Jesus. Fine, Max. I promise.”
    I was shit at promises. The worst.
    I broke them all the time. I made them knowing I was going to break them.
    Over and over again in my life, I had told Jennifer we were going to be okay. Practically from the moment she was born to the day I drove off and left her in that devil’s camp.
    It’s what I had told her that September after Dad died when I loaded her into the truck, that at that point had no brakes and broken windshield wipers, and drove her right to that spanking-new gifted school in Wilomet, telling her to trust me. Promising her we were going to be fine.
    Stupid. A lie. I’d known it the second I walked through the fancy doors. But I crossed those