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encounter out of her mind, but with Chloe going on about how to sign up to play at prom, Lilith was surprised to feel regret about the total nonexistence of her band.
    Then the homeroom door swung open—and in walked the boy from Rattlesnake Creek. He sauntered down the row next to hers and took Chloe King’s seat.
    Heat coursed through Lilith’s body as she studied his motorcycle jacket and the vintage Kinks T-shirt that fit tightly across his chest. She wondered where they sold clothes like that in Crossroads. No store she knew. She’d never met anyone who dressed like him.
    He brushed his dark hair from his eyes and gazed at her.
    Lilith liked the way Cam looked, but she did not like the way he looked at her. There was a sparkle in his eyes that made her uneasy. Like he knew all of her secrets. He probably looked at all the girls that way, and some of them probably loved it. Lilith didn’t—at all—but she forced herself to hold his gaze. She didn’t want him to think he made her nervous.
    “May I help you?” Mrs. Richards asked.
    “I’m new here,” Cam said, still staring at Lilith. “What’s the drill?”
    When he flashed his Trumbull student ID, Lilith was so stunned she fell into a coughing fit. She struggled for control, mortified.
    “Cameron Briel.” Mrs. Richards read from the ID card, then scrutinized Cam from head to toe. “The drill is you sit over there and be quiet.” She pointed at the desk farthest from Lilith, who was still coughing.
    “Lilith,” Mrs. Richards said, “do you know the statistics on the rise of asthma due to increased carbon emissions in the past decade? When you finish coughing, I want you to get out a sheet of paper and write a letter to your congresswoman demanding reform.”
    Seriously? She was getting in trouble for coughing?
    Cam gave Lilith two light thumps on the back, the way her mother did to Bruce when he was having one of his fits. Then he bent down, picked up the diaper, raised an eyebrow at Lilith, and stuffed it inside Chloe’s purse.
    “She might need that later,” he said, and smiled at Lilith as he walked to the other side of the room.
    Trumbull wasn’t a big school, but it was big enough for Lilith to be surprised that Cam was also in her poetry class. She was even more surprised when Mr. Davidson sat him in the empty seat next to her, since Kimi Grace was out sick.
    “Hey,” Cam had said when he slid into the seat.
    Lilith pretended she hadn’t heard him.
    Ten minutes into class, as Mr. Davidson was reading a love sonnet by the Italian poet Petrarch, Cam leaned over and dropped a note onto her desk.
    Lilith looked at the note, then at Cam, then glanced to her right, certain it was meant for someone else. But Paige wasn’t reaching out to take the note from her, and Cam was smirking, nodding at the face of the note on which he’d written in neat black script,
Lilith.
    She opened it and felt a strange rush, the kind she felt when she dipped into a really good book or heard a great song for the first time.
In ten minutes of class, Teach has faced his blackboard an impressive total of eight minutes and forty-eight seconds. By my calculations, you and I could absolutely sneak out the next time he turns around and not be missed until we’re already at Rattlesnake Creek. Wink twice if you’re game.
    Lilith did not even know where to start with this. Wink twice? More like drop dead three times, she wanted to tell him. When she looked up he was wearing a strange, tranquil expression, as if they were the kind of friends who did stuff like this all the time, as if they were any kind of friends. The weird thing was, Lilith skipped class all the time—she’d done it twice yesterday, in homeroom and biology. But she never did it for a fun reason. Escape was always her only option, a survival mechanism. Cam seemed to think he knew who she was and how she lived her life, and that annoyed her. She didn’t want him to think about her at all.
    No,
she