Shortcake

PROLOGUE:

It had been snowing for six days.

The windows of the old house had gone white and blind. You couldn't see the road.

You couldn't see the trees. You couldn't see anything at all but snow falling on snow, and the dark, and her own reflection in the glass, small and pale and very still.

The roads were closed. The phones were dead. Somewhere downstairs, forty-eight people were asleep in front of a fire.

Upstairs, a candle burned on a nightstand, the flame bending sideways in the draft from the window.

She would remember that later. The candle. How it leaned, and leaned, and never went out.

She would remember the ceiling, too. The way she tried to count the cracks in it, the way she had when she was a little girl in the hallway under the high school bleachers during tornado warnings, her mother's hand in hers and the whole town breathing in the dark around her. It always passes, Gem. It always passes. There weren't enough cracks in this ceiling. She ran out of them too fast.

And she would remember the wind. How it sounded exactly like the wind back home. How that was the worst part.

She said no out loud. In her own voice.

She said it three times.

Later, there would be people who asked her why she didn't scream. Why she didn't run. Why she'd walked up those stairs in the first place, and what she'd been wearing, and how much she'd had to drink, and whether she was sure. Later there would be lawyers and a courtroom and twelve strangers in a jury box, and a man in a good gray suit saying her name like it tasted sweet.

But that was later.

That night, there was only the snow, and the candle, and the ceiling cracks she couldn't count.

And a girl from Florence, Oklahoma, who had never wanted to leave home in the first place.

Three months earlier

The house shook with music and voices. Country music poured from the patio speakers, the bass thumping up through the floorboards until the kitchen windows hummed in their frames. Barbecue smoke drifted in through the screen door and settled over everything, tangled up with perfume, sweat and beer.

Gemma Havley couldn't take three steps without being pulled into someone's orbit. A hand on her elbow. A squeeze of her shoulder. A hug that knocked the air out of her and spun her straight into the next pair of arms. She kept her smile wide and steady even though her cheeks ached. She couldn't let it drop. Not tonight, with the whole town watching.

It wasn't the crowd. She could stand in a field with five hundred strangers at Sturgis, sunburned and smelling like gasoline, and feel nothing but content. Nobody looked at you twice at a rally. You were just one more face around the fire. It was this. Every single face in the room turned toward her at once. Every eye on her, waiting for her to be something.

Her mother had invited all of Florence, Oklahoma, and it looked like all of Florence had come. Gemma had spent her whole life inside this town, its fields and grain elevator and storm-bent skyline as familiar as her own breathing. By noon tomorrow she'd be on the road to Bronson, Colorado. People kept calling it a fresh start. To Gemma it felt like a demolition. She hated change, and this was a wrecking ball.

But she owed it to Mr. Grant. Her senior English teacher had spent months on her applications, writing letters, marking up her essays until the paper was soft from erasing. He'd insisted that Gemma send in an application to Morton. She'd sent it in to make him happy, not thinking for one second she'd ever get one of the coveted spots. He believed in her words more than she ever had. The least she could do now was go find out if he was right.

She searched the crowd for Tony. He'd said he'd be here by nine, and it was nearly ten.

Instead she got her cousin Marie, who swept her into a bear hug that lifted her heels clean off the kitchen floor. "Gemma! You absolute legend. Four years in Colorado and then you come home and run for mayor, right?" Marie's breath was pure Coors, but her eyes shone with real pride.

Gemma laughed and tried to wriggle free. Marie only squeezed harder.

"Think of all the stories you'll have," Marie said, finally letting go. "You better write me in your first novel. But, like, a hot version of me."

"You'll get your own chapter," Gemma promised. Marie whooped and sloshed beer down both their arms.

She was on her way to the kitchen for more ice when she heard her name.

It came from the living room, from the little knot of people gathered by the fireplace: her father, two of the ladies from her mother's church circle, Mr. Delbert from the bar with a plate of pulled pork. And in the middle of them, in a short-sleeved shirt with a drink in his hand, his reading glasses pushed up on his bald head, Mr. Grant.

"Twenty-five," he was saying. "Out of the whole country. Thousands of kids applied, from every big-city prep school you can think of, and they took twenty-five. And one of them's from Florence, Oklahoma." He shook his head like he still couldn't believe it. "One of them's our girl."

The church ladies made admiring noises. Her father stood there with his arms folded and his face doing something complicated.

"I've had her since she was fourteen," Mr. Grant went on. "Every summer. That writing workshop I teach in the gym, the one nobody signs up for unless their mama makes them. She signed herself up, the June before her freshman year. Sat in the back row with a spiral notebook and didn't say a word for three days. Then on the fourth day, she turned in a page about her granddaddy's pickup truck that made me take my glasses off." He tapped the glasses on his head. "She came back every summer after that. Every single one. Complained about the heat every single day."

The whole circle laughed.

"I've watched her grow up on the page, Don," Mr. Grant said, quieter now, turning to her father. "Thirty-four years teaching English in this town, and I don't know that I've ever had one like her. I'm so proud of that girl I could bust."