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wouldn’t be as scary as this one.
    It makes me think about Marcus and fathers, mine and his both, and the morning my dad caught me sneaking out.
    You wouldn’t think it would be easy for a fifteen-year-old girl to get up at the ass crack of dawn to go train at a boxing gym, but it turns out it is actually incredibly easy to do if that fifteen-year-old girl knows she gets to train with Marcus Roma. Or at least that’s how it worked for me. And believe me, I have never been a morning person. But my alarm would go off at four thirty and I would practically shoot out of bed, full of energy and actually smiling.
    It would have been creepy if there’d been anyone around to see it. But I normally left for school before my parents were up, since the high school got an early start and my parents both worked in creative fields where everyone rolled into the office sometime after ten, and I had, um, elected not to tell them that the school lothario had volunteered to teach me to box in the mornings. Alone. Just the two of us. In a gym.
    I can’t imagine why I didn’t share that particular piece of information.
    Obviously I was rocking a massive crush on Marcus. I mean, I was aware of it. It kind of annoyed me, in a way, because it felt very schoolgirlish. And I was, technically, a schoolgirl, but I also very much wanted to be older, wiser. More mature.
    The girls Marcus went out with, for example: they seemed way mature, at the time. They acted like they were, anyway, going out clubbing on weekends, getting wasted, and I was too young to always spot the difference. And they had sex. There were those who had sex and those who didn’t. It was like a divided country, and Marcus and those other girls were on the other side of the wall.
    Basically I felt hopelessly inadequate, but I wanted him to like me. Not just want me, though I wanted that, too. I wanted him to…I don’t know. Approve.
    So I worked my ass off. And I did my best to ignore my silly schoolgirl crush. I decided that if I was going to have a crush on Marcus Roma, it was going to be for real reasons. Like, that we had the same thoughts about literature or something, I had no idea. But definitely not just because he was gorgeous, and not just because every other girl in school wanted him, and not just because it would make me feel special to have him look at me that way.
    Real reasons.
    Later, after the accident, after everything that happened, that felt a whole lot like tempting fate.
    Anyhow, Marcus Roma really got to me, even before the accident, and I know because of what happened the morning I got caught sneaking out in the morning by my dad.
    My dad was not amused. He didn’t entirely believe me at first. Who sneaks out to go to the gym, right? I had to show him all my workout stuff to convince him, and even then he still looked suspicious.
    “Who is this Marcus?” he demanded, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose, the way he did when he wanted me to know he was serious. He was still in his bathrobe and the cow slippers I’d bought him for Christmas.
    “He’s a friend, Dad,” I said. I probably rolled my eyes at him obnoxiously. One of those things I wish I could take back.
    “A friend who gets up to meet you in secret at the crack of dawn?” my dad said. “A male friend?”
    “It is not like that.”
    “Then tell me what it’s like, Harlow.”
    Dad used his stern voice, which I remember thinking was funny at the time, because his curly hair was still sticking out all over the place from sleeping on it weird.
    God, it’s strange, the things you miss after someone’s gone.
    Anyway, I tried to tell him about it, but I didn’t have a good explanation of why I wanted to learn how to fight, at least not one I was able to articulate at the time. I think I said, “It makes me feel good about myself.”
    I just didn’t specify in what way it made me feel good about myself.
    And I had to explain that we had to train in secret, because Pops