Sublime

“Shit.” He scrubs at his wiry gray stubble. “Guess I should have known by the way you’re always watching her like you’re imagining her with her clothes off. Was gonna tell you to tone down the gawking this week, to be honest.” Well, fuck.

he was the dumbest person in their class, admitted as a sort of unofficial poor-white-rural-dweller-oddity affirmative-action representative.)

Des Moines

“Sounds like her loss, because you might be the coolest kid I’ve ever met.” She doesn’t use a sad voice, or a baby voice, she just talks to him like a normal human being. “Fucking hell,” I curse under my breath because she just practically hired herself.

I laugh wetly, shake my head again. “You said your mom would never let someone outside the family run the store.” His eyes settle on my face, his expression going serious. “I think she’s hopeful Libby won’t be outside the family forever.”

collogue.

She was smarter than him and they both knew it. It wasn’t just school—Lane Dean was in accounting and business and did all right, he was hanging in there. She was a year older, she was twenty, but it was also more—she had always seemed to Lane to be on good terms with her life in a way age could not account for. His mother had put it that she knew