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was a blur of shifting movements that she could barely remember, except that it always involved her suitcase, which seemed to stay packed. She went to live with Stu, where she didn’t even have her own bedroom. She stayed in the guest room unless Sherry’s mother visited and then she was shuttled to the toy room or family-room sofa. She visited Lief on at least a couple of weekends a month. Then, after six months of that, she went back to living with Lief and visiting Stu. Then after she cut and dyed her hair several colors, painted her fingernails black and wore black lipstick, Stu told Lief he could have her full-time, that she didn’t have to visit anymore. He actually said it way worse than that, and she’d been relieved. She’d heard her stepmother call her “that weird little monster.”
    But Lief got furious that her father not only didn’t want her full-time but didn’t even want visits, so she got it—no one wanted her. Oh, Lief said he did, but he didn’t. If he did, he would have been happy with her father for giving her back, but he was not happy. There was a huge fight; her two dads were yelling and got real close to hitting and she wished they’d just beat each other to death.
    She didn’t hear from her father again after that blowout. That had been months ago. The whole back-and-forth thing ending with Lief had started in seventh grade. And that was when she started calling him Lief.
    She blew on her nails and checked them. They were dry. She applied the lipstick and gloss.
    She had stopped growing then. She used to be a chubby little girl, and now she was a skinny short girl with a couple of bumps on her chest that were supposed to pass as boobs. Her Goth, biker-chick look meant no one would expect her to be all giggly.
    She started looking up suicide clubs on the internet until Lief had caught her and taken her to a counselor who told her she was angry. Duh. She had to sit with that lame counselor every week, and on top of that, they did some stupid grief counseling with all grown-ups. She almost got back to liking Lief after he said he thought the counselor was lame, too, and that a grief group for adults was no place for her and refused to take her. She liked him for that.
    They might still be in L.A. where she was born and had lived right up to ninth grade, if she hadn’t gotten in some trouble, and she might not have gotten in trouble if her friends hadn’t all disappeared on her. First it was because they couldn’t stand her feeling sorry for herself, then she wasn’t like them anymore with her black clothes and weird hair. So she found herself a few new friends who did things like get into their parents’ medicine chests, score a little pot sometimes, lift money from their moms’ purses and dads’ wallets—for the pot, of course—and, about the only thing she found any fun at all, snuck out after the folks were asleep. They didn’t really do anything; they hung out where they wouldn’t get hassled, smoked some cigarettes sometimes. Bitched about the rules. Courtney wasn’t into the pills and pot; she just experimented a little. She felt weird and bad enough; she didn’t like not knowing how she was going to feel. She pretended, mostly. She had to. She couldn’t stand the thought of being all alone again. If the good kids dumped her and the bad kids dumped her, who was left?
    So Lief said, “This isn’t working, this city. You find too much trouble and I’m sick of the noise and traffic. We’re getting out of here. I’m going to find us something sane. I’d like if we could get back to at least being friends, like we used to be. And you could use a chance to start over. Maybe on the right side of the law?”
    Now, Courtney had not wanted to move. Period. Even though she’d lost her old friends and didn’t like her new ones. There was something about boxing up her life and putting it on a truck, moving away from where she’d been with her mom that just freaked her out,