The door wasn't locked. That was the first thing Aliyah noticed — her mother had left the deadbolt unlatched, which meant she'd been waiting up, which meant she'd heard the car pull into the lot and hadn't moved from wherever she was sitting. The second thing was the smell: coffee gone bitter and cold, the pot probably still on the warmer, and under it the sharp green smell of the cleaning spray Maya only used when she was too angry to sit still.

The living room lamp was on. One lamp, the corner one with the crooked shade, throwing everything in a tired yellow. Maya sat on the sofa with her scrub top still on and her braids pulled back so tight at the temples that the skin looked polished. Her phone was face-down on the cushion beside her thigh, screen dark.

"Mama."

"Don't." Maya didn't look up. She was looking at the coffee table, at the ring of water her cup had left on the glass. "Fourteen hours, Aliyah. Fourteen. I counted every one of them."

"I know. I texted you—"

"You texted me at hour thirteen." Now she looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. "You want to tell me you were at a study group, go ahead. Say it. Let me hear you say it so I know exactly what kind of lie you've decided I'm stupid enough to believe."

Aliyah stood in the middle of the rug with her hoodie still zipped to her chin and her keys cutting into her palm. The lie was right there, fully formed, sitting on her tongue — the library, the group project, her phone died. It would take eight seconds. Her mother would look at her the way she'd looked at her for nineteen years: like a child who needed correcting.

"I was with a boy," she said.

The words landed in the room like a dropped plate. Maya's jaw moved, once, and then went still.

"A boy."

"His name is Jaehyun. He's in my chem class. He's been tutoring me." She heard her own voice go thin and pushed it flat again. "I fell asleep at his place. That's why it got late. And then I didn't want to come home and face you, so I stayed out longer, and that was wrong, and I'm sorry."

Maya stood up. She was shorter than Aliyah by two inches and she had never once in Aliyah's life seemed it. "Do you know what I was doing at hour eight?" She picked her phone up, turned it over, didn't unlock it. "I was on the phone with your aunt. Asking if she'd heard from you. Do you know what that does to me — calling my sister to ask if she's heard from my daughter, when the last time I made that call—"

She stopped.

The room got very quiet. The refrigerator kicked on in the kitchen and Aliyah flinched at it.

"I know," Aliyah said. Her throat was tight. "Mama, I know."

"You don't." Maya's voice had gone low and rough, the way it did when she was holding something down. "You were fifteen. You don't know what it was like from this side of it. I sat with your aunt in that hospital for six days. Six days, and then I drove her home to a house with a bedroom in it that nobody was ever going to sleep in again." She pressed the phone against her sternum. "And every single time you don't answer, I am back in that hallway. That's what you're doing to me. You understand? That's what fourteen hours does."

Aliyah's eyes were burning and she hated it. She'd promised herself she wasn't going to cry, that she'd walk in with her chin up and take her punishment like an adult, and here she was at minute four with her nose going hot.

"I'm not her," she said.

"Don't you dare." Maya's head came up. "Don't you dare say that to me like I don't know it. I know exactly who you are. I know it so well I can't sleep."

"Then stop treating me like the thing that's going to happen to you." Aliyah wiped her face with the back of her wrist, hard. "I'm nineteen. I'm a whole person, Mama. I'm not — I'm not a thing you keep in the house so nothing bad can get to it. And I know that's not fair, I know you lost her, but I've been losing stuff too. I lost my whole summer. I don't go anywhere. I don't do anything. My friends stopped inviting me because I always have to say no and they got tired of it." Her voice cracked and she let it. "I'm so tired of being scared in my own house. I'm scared to ask you for anything because everything turns into a lecture about all the ways the world can kill me."

Maya sat back down. Not slowly — she sat like her legs had decided for her, one hand braced on the arm of the sofa.

"So what do you want," she said. "You want me to just — let you go? Not know where you are, not know who with, just trust that you'll come home in one piece because you're nineteen and you feel like it?"

"I want you to trust me at all."

That got a long silence. Maya looked at her — actually looked, the way she did when Aliyah was small and had a fever and her mother was trying to read her temperature off her face. Then she picked up her cold coffee and drank it anyway, and made a face at it, and set it back down.

"Go to bed," she said. "We'll talk in the morning. I can't do this at one in the morning with cold coffee in my mouth."

Aliyah didn't move. "That's not a no."

"It's not a no. It's not a yes either." Maya pointed at the hallway. "Bed. Now. And Aliyah—" She waited until Aliyah turned. "You told me the truth. I noticed. Don't think I didn't notice."

In her room, Aliyah shut the door and leaned against it and pulled out her phone. Her hands were shaking so badly she had to type the message twice.

she didn't kill me. but i think i might've made it worse. i told her the truth and now she's just sitting in there looking at the wall

She watched the screen. The little delivered receipt didn't come up. She watched it for a full minute, then two, then set the phone face-down on her nightstand and lay down in her clothes and stared at the ceiling with her heart going like a bird in a shoebox.

He was driving. He'd said he'd wait until she got inside, and then he'd have to drive home, and it was a twenty-minute drive, and then he'd walk into his apartment and probably not even look at his phone. She knew this. She knew all of it. It didn't help. She turned the phone back over four times over the next hour, and each time the screen was just her lock screen, and each time she felt stupider than the last.

Somewhere around two-thirty she heard her mother's footsteps go down the hall and the bathroom door click, and then the sound of the faucet, and then Maya's door shutting for the night. Aliyah lay in the dark and thought about the hospital hallway her mother had described, and about her cousin's laugh — she could still remember it, that big dumb laugh, the way she'd throw her head back — and she put her arm over her eyes and cried for a while, quietly, in a way she hadn't let herself do in years.

She woke up to sunlight and the smell of eggs.

Maya was at the stove in her robe with her braids wrapped, and there were two plates out on the counter, and she didn't turn around when Aliyah came in and sat down at the little table with her knees together and her hands in her lap like she was waiting for a principal.

"Eat first," Maya said. "I'm not arguing with you on an empty stomach."

They ate. The eggs were good — she'd put cheese in them, the way Aliyah liked — and the silence stretched out long enough that Aliyah started counting her own chews to keep from saying something stupid.

Then Maya set her fork down and said, "I've been up since five."

"Mama—"

"I've been up since five and I've been thinking, and I'm going to say a thing and you're going to let me finish it before you start." She folded her hands on the table. "You're right. Not about all of it — you're not right about all of it, and I'm not going to pretend you are, because you walked in here at one in the morning and I'm still not over that and I won't be for a while. But you're right that I've been holding you so tight I've been hurting you. I've been doing it because I'm scared. That's the whole truth of it. I'm scared and I've been making you pay for it."

Aliyah couldn't say anything. Her mouth was full of egg and her eyes were doing that hot thing again.

"So here's what we're going to do," Maya said. "You get a curfew. A real one, not a suggestion. You're not going to be walking in this house at any hour of the night like it's a motel — you do that again and you can just stay outside, I mean it, I'll change the locks and you can call me from the parking lot. But you're not a prisoner either. You're going to tell me where you are and who you're with, and you're going to be home when you say you're going to be home, and if something happens and it runs late you call me. You call me and I'll be mad, but I'll be mad on the phone instead of losing my mind in this living room."

"What's the curfew?" Aliyah asked, cautious, the way you'd ask a dog's owner if it bites.

"Midnight on school nights. One on the weekends." Maya held up a finger before Aliyah could open her mouth. "And your grade comes up before any of that starts. You're still grounded until that chem grade moves, and I want to see the progress reports, not just hear about them."

One o'clock. Aliyah turned it over in her head. One o'clock was — it wasn't nothing. It was a door opening a crack. And somewhere behind her ribs, a small mean voice noted that Jaehyun had his own place, and that one o'clock would never actually be the thing that ended a night with him, and her face went hot all the way to her ears.

"Okay," she said. "Deal."

Maya squinted at her. "Why are you pink."

"I'm not pink. It's the eggs. They're spicy."

"There's no spice in those eggs." Maya picked up her plate and carried it to the sink, and Aliyah heard her mutter something that sounded a lot like mm-hmm, and then, over the running water: "This Jaehyun. He's the one who was driving you home."

"Yes ma'am."

"He treat you right?"

Aliyah thought about the locker room, and the way he'd held her face in both hands after, and the way he'd said it wasn't nothing in a kitchen with his back to her. "Yeah," she said. "He does."

Maya turned off the water. "Then he can come to dinner sometime. Sunday. And I'll decide for myself."

—

The hallway two days later smelled like floor wax and somebody's microwave lunch, and Aliyah was at her locker with her hood up and her chemistry binder hugged to her chest when she felt the presence of three people arrive at once, like weather.

"So." Nia leaned against the locker beside hers with her arms crossed. Behind her, Priya and Camille had arranged themselves in a loose semicircle that was not at all accidental. "You want to tell us something, or do we have to drag it out of you in the cafeteria where everyone can hear?"

Aliyah's stomach dropped. "Tell you what?"

"Two days ago you walked into chem like a baby deer on ice," Priya said. "You held the doorframe. You held the doorframe, Ali. I saw you."

"I was sore from the gym—"

"The gym," Nia repeated. She said it the way you'd repeat a bad excuse back to a child. "You. The gym. Girl, you don't go to the gym. You told me last month the gym was 'a scam invented by people who hate fun.'"

Camille's hand came up, one finger raised, her head tilted like she was doing arithmetic. "Wait. Wait. Two days ago. That was Wednesday." She looked at Priya and something passed between them, quick and wordless. "You missed half of Thursday too. You were gone by second period."

"I had a doctor's—"

"You've never had a doctor's appointment in your life that didn't involve your mother standing right behind you," Nia said. "Every time you get sick you text me from the parking lot like I'm your emergency contact." She pushed off the locker and stood in front of Aliyah instead, arms still folded, and her voice dropped out of its performance register into the one that meant she actually wanted an answer. "Ali. Look at me."

Aliyah looked. The hallway was filling up around them — a kid on a skateboard weaving through, somebody's sneakers squeaking, a door banging somewhere down the science wing — and all of it felt very far away, like it was happening behind glass.

Her face was already going. She could feel the heat climbing her neck, spreading up over her ears, and she pulled her hood back because hiding inside it suddenly felt worse than being seen. Her natural hair was doing its own thing today, half-flat on one side from the pillow, and she pressed it down with her palm and gave up on it.

"I wasn't at the gym," she said.

Priya's eyebrows went up so high her whole forehead moved. "Oh, she's confessing. Everybody get in close, we're getting a confession."

"Priya." Nia didn't turn around. "Shut up for a second."

The hallway noise seemed to drop. Aliyah could hear her own binder creaking against her forearm where she was gripping it too hard.

"I was with somebody," she said, and it came out low, almost swallowed. "I stayed at his place. Wednesday night. I didn't go home."

Three faces changed at three different speeds. Camille's mouth opened. Priya made a sound like she'd been jabbed. Nia just stared, her jaw working, and then she said, very carefully, "His place."

"His place."

"Whose place, Aliyah."

Aliyah looked at the floor. Somebody had tracked salt in on their boots and it was drying in little gray crusts on the tile. She counted four of them before she trusted her voice.

"Jaehyun's."

The silence that followed had a texture. It was the silence of three people rearranging everything they thought they knew, in real time, without any of the machinery to do it quietly.

"Jaehyun," Camille said. "Jaehyun Park."

"There's another Jaehyun?"

"There's no other Jaehyun, that's my point." Camille's voice was climbing. "Aliyah. Aliyah. Jaehyun Park who won't speak to anybody who isn't in a suit. Jaehyun Park who put his headphones in on you for three weeks straight. That Jaehyun?"

"That one."

Priya had gone very still, and then a slow, awful delight started spreading across her face, the way it did when she smelled a story. "The soreness," she said. "The doorframe. You weren't sore from anything, you were—"

"My legs didn't work right," Aliyah said, and then heard herself, and her whole face went hot. "Okay? My legs didn't work right and I had to hold the doorframe because I couldn't feel my knees and I was scared I was going to go down in the middle of chem with Dr. Whitfield watching me."

Nia's arms came uncrossed. "What did he do to you."

It wasn't the question Aliyah had braced for. It was flat and hard and her friend's eyes had gone narrow and serious, and Aliyah understood all at once that Nia had a whole different story loaded and ready, and that she would not have to be talked into doing something about it.

"No — no, Nia, it's not — it wasn't like that." Aliyah reached out and got her hand. "He didn't do anything I didn't want. He didn't. I promise you. It was — I wanted it. It was good. It was so good it scared me a little, but he didn't hurt me."

"Then why'd you come in here walking like you'd been hit by a car?"

"Because I had." Aliyah heard the laugh come out of her own mouth, high and a little unhinged. "I had, Nia. That's the whole — that's the entire thing. I had, and I liked it, and I have not been able to think about anything else for two days, and my mother nearly killed me, and I'm standing here at my locker with a B-minus in chemistry and a boy who calls me princess."

She heard the word after it left her mouth. Wished she could take it back into the air.

"Princess," Priya said, drawing it out into four syllables. "He calls you princess."

"He called me it once—"

"Once is enough, that's a whole personality, that's a whole man—"

"Priya, I swear to God—"

Camille had her hand over her mouth and her shoulders were shaking. She pulled her hand down. "I need a timeline. I need it right now. Because the last thing I heard, you were going to his house to do worksheets, and now you're telling me—"

"He did the worksheets," Aliyah said. "That's real. He did my whole problem set while I was asleep on his bed. I woke up and he'd finished it and gone to take a shower and I thought — I thought he'd left, and then he came out with a towel on and water in his hair and the towel was doing a lot of work, and then he told me what he actually wanted."

"What he actually wanted," Nia repeated.

"To lose it. His — his virginity." The word felt enormous in her mouth. "There was a bet. His brother and his brother's friends, they had a whole thing about who'd be last, and he doesn't come in last at anything, and I was—" She stopped. "I was there."

Nia's face did something complicated. "He used you for a bet."

"No." The word came out harder than Aliyah meant it, and she felt her chin lift. "He didn't use me. He asked me. He told me exactly what it was, straight up, no lies, and I could have walked out of that apartment and he'd have let me. I stayed because I wanted to stay." She heard her own voice and how sure it was, and it startled her. "And then he made me breakfast."

There was a beat.

"He made you breakfast," Priya said.

"Cereal and toast. The toast was burnt on one side. He tried to do eggs and they went wrong, and he scraped them into the sink and didn't make a thing of it, he just got out the bread." Aliyah's thumb found the edge of her binder and worried at it. "And he said he saw me. The times I came up to him and he ignored me. He said he saw me every time."

Camille let out a long breath and leaned back against the lockers. "Okay," she said. "Okay. I'm going to say the thing nobody's saying, which is that this is the most insane week of your entire life and I'm a little jealous."

"Jealous," Nia said.

"You're not?" Camille gestured at Aliyah. "Look at her. She's glowing. She's standing there with her hair a mess and a hickey the size of a quarter on her neck and she's glowing."

Aliyah's hand flew up to her neck. Her fingers found it — a rough patch just under her jaw, tender to the touch, and she remembered exactly how it had gotten there, his mouth dragging up the side of her throat and his voice saying something low and terrible against her skin, and her knees did a small private betrayal.

"Oh my God," Priya said, delighted. "Oh my God. There it is. There's the face."

"There's no face—"

"There's a whole face, Camille, are you seeing this face—"

"I'm seeing it."

"It's not—" Aliyah pulled her hood back up, which was the wrong move, because it made them laugh, and then she was laughing too, helpless, mortified, one hand still covering her neck. The hallway had thinned out around them; the first bell was coming, kids starting to drift and peel off toward their classes, and none of them moved.

Nia hadn't laughed. She was watching Aliyah with her arms folded again but loose now, her head tilted.

"And your mom?" she said. "You said she nearly killed you."

"She sat me down and made me say it to her face." The laugh went out of Aliyah's voice. "I told her I was with a boy and then I told her the rest — some of it — and she cried, Nia. She talked about my cousin and the hospital and how she was on the phone with my aunt at hour eight, and then this morning she made me eggs and told me I get a curfew and she wants to meet him."

"She wants to meet him," Camille said.

"Sunday dinner. She's going to 'decide for herself.'" Aliyah made air quotes with her free hand, and her stomach turned over just thinking about it. "He's going to walk into my mother's apartment on Sunday and she's going to look at him the way she looks at a stain."

"He'll be fine," Priya said, and then, "Actually, no, that's a lie, your mother is terrifying. But he's the class president. He'll be fine."

"He's a twenty-year-old man who lives in his own apartment and my mother is going to ask him what his intentions are and he's going to say something so dry and rude that she'll ground me until I'm thirty."

Nia pushed off her locker, and the three of them shifted, and Aliyah understood the interrogation was over — that it had turned into something else, the four of them standing in a loose little knot in the thinning hallway, and Nia was looking at her in a way she hadn't in a long time.

"You know what I'm going to ask," Nia said.

"Nia—"

"You've been gone for like a month, Ali. Not gone gone, but — you know. You stopped coming out. You stopped answering the group chat half the time. We stopped asking because it got weird." Nia said it without heat, just laying it on the table. "And now you show up with a boy and a hickey and a whole secret life and I'm supposed to just—"

"I know." Aliyah's throat tightened. "I know. I'm sorry. It wasn't — it wasn't that I didn't want to. My mom had me so locked down I couldn't breathe, and every time you guys invited me out I had to say no and I got so tired of saying no that I just started saying nothing."

"So say something now."

Aliyah looked at her — at Nia with her arms folded and her jaw set and her eyes a little too bright, and Priya and Camille flanking her, and she felt something come loose in her chest that had been cinched tight for weeks.

"There's a party," she said.

The three of them blinked at her.

"Friday. At Marcus's place, that whole thing, the one you've been talking about." Aliyah swallowed. "I got a curfew now. One o'clock on weekends. But I can come. I can actually come. And I want to."

Nia's mouth curved, slow. "You want to."

"I want to."

"With us."

"With you." Aliyah's voice cracked on it, and she cleared her throat. "And I might — I might bring him. If he'll come. I don't know if he'll come, he's not really a party person, he's the kind of person who'd stand in a corner with a cup of water and judge everybody—"

"Oh, bring him," Priya said. "Bring him. I need to see the class president at a house party. I need to see what he wears."

"He'll wear gym shorts," Aliyah said. "He always wears gym shorts. He looks like he rolled out of bed and he still—" She stopped herself, but it was too late, the sentence had already gone somewhere, and Camille's eyebrows went up.

"Still what," Camille said.

Aliyah's face went hot all over again, and this time there was no egg to blame it on. She turned to her locker and spun the dial and made a great production of it, and behind her Priya was making a sound like a kettle.

"Still what, Aliyah," Priya said.

"Still outshines everybody," Aliyah muttered to the metal door.

"I'm sorry, I didn't catch that—"

"I said he still outshines everybody, Priya, are you happy—"

The locker popped open and Aliyah shoved her binder in and grabbed the wrong textbook and had to put it back and grab the right one, and her hands were not entirely steady, and Nia was laughing now, actually laughing, and it was the first time in a while that the sound of it didn't feel like something happening to somebody else.

"Hey." Nia's hand landed on her shoulder. "I'm glad you told us. Even the gross parts."

"There were no gross parts—"

"There were so many gross parts, but I'm glad." Nia squeezed once and let go. "Friday. Don't flake on me."

"I won't flake."

"Don't flake."

"I said I won't."

The hallway had almost emptied out. Down the far end, a door swung wide and somebody's voice rang out across the tile, and the sound of it made all four of them turn their heads at once — a sharp, delighted, disbelieving oh my god that carried the whole length of the corridor and landed in Aliyah's stomach like a stone.

She turned back to her friends.

"Oh my god," Nia said slowly, and her eyes had gone very wide, and she was looking at something over Aliyah's shoulder. "You didn't."

The bell rang.