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that. Whenever she was in the IGA she had to look at aisles and aisles of things she couldn’t have, not when there were so many things she and Daddy needed worse. Whenever she went on break she craved the dumb things most people could buy without a second thought: pretty cards in the card aisle, shiny heart-shaped balloons, bunches of flowers. Donuts. Bright markers. Snickers bars. Pepsi.
    I hate being poor .
    â€œYou don’t mind drinking out of the same can, do you?” Butch passed it to her without waiting for an answer. Yes, she did kind of mind, but she drank anyway.
    They were both sweeping up. Grapes made the worst mess, loose ones rolling under the tables and squished ones and shredded leaves and squiggly bits of stem. Tess muscled her big push broom and drank Pepsi at the same time. “You’re in ninth grade, right?” Butch asked.
    â€œRight.” She smiled at him. Probably he was just being nice, but still, it felt good. She never would have dreamed that a good-looking, popular boy like Butch would act interested in her, even if it was just because he worked with her.
    In the same easy tone he asked, “How old are you?”
    â€œFourteen.”
    â€œSo how come they’re letting you work here?”
    Too late Tess saw her mistake. “No. Sixteen,” she said. “I meant sixteen. I’m in ninth grade but I’m sixteen.” She was talking too fast and her voice wanted to rise. “They held me back. I flunked a couple of grades in elementary school.”
    He had stopped sweeping and stood watching her with that cocky grin of his. “Bull,” he said.
    â€œButch.” She managed to keep her voice down, almost whispering; what if Lupe heard, or Jonna? “Please. I need this job. Don’t tell.”
    â€œYou bad girl.” He was smiling, teasing. “You lied. What if I tell?”
    â€œButch, please .”
    â€œRelax, Tess.” He smiled a different way and turned back to his sweeping. “How old are you? Sixteen, right?”
    â€œRight.” Her voice was creaky, her knees shaky with relief. “Thanks.” He was nice after all. Just for a second there she had felt like he wasn’t.
    â€œNo problem,” he said. “Sometime you’ll do something for me.”
    When she got out of work Tess looked for Kam. She walked all around the building. He wasn’t there.
    She hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. Each night when she walked out the IGA’s back door she was looking for him, but he wasn’t there. All the way up the steep road out of Hinkles Corner and cutting through the salvage yard and down a dirt track past the sawmill and along a tractor path and the creek path and through the rocks and up Miller’s pasture, all the way home she was looking for him, but he wasn’t there. And she didn’t know where he was staying. Sleeping in somebody’s barn, probably, God knew where. There was no good reason for her to be looking for him—it would have been just too bizarre to really think he was her brother—but he was on her mind like the “Secret Star” song. She flunked two quizzes in school those couple of days, and when she thought of Kam her chest felt so hollow she didn’t care.
    Wednesday at work she was flattening empty cardboard boxes, and she had heard “Secret Star” twice and knew she would never in her life get tired of it, when the sweet-faced, sad-eyed woman, Lupe, came back from break and said to her, “There’s a boy waiting out back to see you when you get a chance.”
    Tess’s head jerked up so quickly her neck cracked.
    â€œIf it’s that ugly-faced one-eyed friend of yours,” Butch said, “tell him to bug off.”
    How the—how did he know about Kam? She gawked at him.
    â€œHe’s been hanging around, asking questions,” Butch said. “Tell him to stay out of my face.” He patted his