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with a hand over her mouth, and she slammedthe front door of her house, and it took me a second to realize what had just happened. She had asked to come in. I had said no. No, I had just threatened to throw something at the wall.
    We weren’t arguing. We’d spent half our lives arguing about everything and nothing—I loved it, and I’m pretty sure she did, too. But I’d never told her she couldn’t come in. I’d never threatened to throw something against the wall. We weren’t arguing now.
    We were done.
    I took a blue vase off the mantel above the fireplace—it was a gift from my father to my mother, years ago. It held flowers back then. The flowers died, but she kept the vase. I turned it over, tossed it up in the air like a baseball, caught it against the palm of my hand. Then I pulled back my arm and hurled it against the wall.
    Honestly, I felt a little better.
    I heard Delaney leave for work the next morning. I stood at my bedroom window, and she didn’t even look up. Didn’t even pause in the driveway before opening her dad’s car door. I was in my room where time had stopped, but she kept moving. Everyone kept moving. I didn’t go to work. Didn’t call in to explain or ask for time off or anything. I just stopped going. There were only two weeks left until school started anyway.
    Delaney kept going, every morning. I heard her car door close, every morning, at the same time, a second after her father’s. I saw Maya eating dinner at her house, night afternight. I saw them sitting on the porch swing together after, Maya’s voice carrying across the yard while Delaney rocked in silence. In the beginning of the summer, when I had been not so subtle about wanting more time with just Delaney, and less with Maya, Delaney told me to cut her some slack. Her brother was spending half his time in Portland, where they moved from. Her mother needed full-time care. Delaney said Maya needed someone.
    Joanne, for once, took my side. “What happens after?” she’d asked Delaney. “Where’s her dad? Where will she go?” But Delaney said she wasn’t about to bring that up, and Joanne kept making the poor girl—her words, not mine—food and sending the leftovers home for her mom.
    Funny how I’d been so scared of losing her.
    I’d spent six days in the hospital with Delaney, waiting for her to wake up.
    I’d spent eight months after, scared she’d disappear.
    But in the end, I was the one who told her to go. She listened. And she went to work, on time, the very next day.
    I hadn’t left the house in nearly two weeks, and I was not looking forward to setting my alarm tomorrow and going to school, pretending everything was normal.
    “Decker?” my mom called from somewhere in the house.
    “Yeah,” I said. She didn’t let me stay in my room all day. Not after the first week. I wandered down the stairs and fell onto the sofa, remote in hand.
    She was searching through the drawers in the foyer. “Getting out of the house today?”
    “School starts tomorrow. I’ll be out of the house all the time.”
    She sighed. “I’m leaving,” she said, pulling her hair back into a ponytail.
    These are the things that are supposed to happen on Labor Day—the things that happened last year and the year before that: One, Main Street gets blocked off and people hand out free food and paint kids’ faces and Delaney and I share a whole pizza before noon, because it’s free, but only before noon. Two, we meet up with our friends and Tara’s grandmother tells fortunes, and we all crowd around, listening to what she says about the lines in our hands and the rings in our eyes. Three, we go to Justin’s lake house to celebrate the end of summer. Which in hindsight makes no sense anyway.
    “You sure you’re not going out?”
    “Yep,” I said. One, I wasn’t hungry. Two, I didn’t want to hear any more lies about my future. Three, Maya’s family had moved into Justin’s lake house over the summer. Permanently.
    And