I had to wait to see him, but luckily I’d gotten to school early. Mrs. Perkins gave me another lollipop and I crunched it while I waited. I couldn’t help thinking about Gert, Mombi, and Glamora, lurking in their weird limbo state, waiting for me to accomplish something. Anything. And Nox. Where was he? Was he thinking about me, too? Was he wondering if I was safe? Did he care? Was it possible to drive yourself completely insane in fifteen minutes in a plastic chair in a hallway or did it just feel that way? Finally, Assistant Principal Strachan called me into his office, looking none too pleased to see me.

“What is it now, Miss Gumm?”

“Sir, I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday. I’m just so grateful you’ve lifted my suspension, but it really doesn’t seem fair.”

He raised an eyebrow, but said nothing as I continued. “I understand I was so much trouble before, and I want to convince you I’ve changed.” I tried to remember the speech my mom had used on me. “I know I don’t deserve forgiveness,” I added, “but I’m going to work for it all the same.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I want to serve detention, sir. After school, for the same amount of time as I should have been suspended.”

Assistant Principal Strachan stared at me. “You want detention?”

“It’s the only way to show you I mean what I say,” I explained. This didn’t really make sense, even to me, but he seemed to buy it. Or at least he couldn’t figure out a sinister motive behind my sudden desire to scrub the hallways and dust the library.

“Very well,” he said, his eyes narrowed. “You will serve out your suspension as a detention for the next two weeks. I don’t know what you’re up to, Miss Gumm, but if I find out you’re doing anything shady—”

“You won’t, sir!” I said quickly, grabbing my bag and resisting the urge to give him a big kiss on the cheek. He was still staring after me in confusion as I ran out the door.

I was so ready to start searching that I didn’t pay attention to much of anything that day. I ate lunch with Dustin and Madison again; true to his word, Dustin had shown up so late for first period that he, too, was sentenced to after-school purgatory. “Aren’t you worried they’ll kick you out of school, too?” I asked him.

“Are you kidding? I was on the football team,” he said. Madison snorted in disgust and muttered something that sounded a lot like “bullshit double standards.”

I was practically bouncing in my seat on the long hard cafeteria bench. Dustin Jr. was in a cheerful mood, waving his arms around and drooling on his terry-cloth onesie. Watching Madison taking care of her baby, I was struck by how much she had changed. She was still tough, but now it seemed protective. You could tell she didn’t really know what she was doing. Sometimes she seemed almost terrified of the baby, as if she might drop him or do something totally wrong. Dustin obviously had no clue how to deal with an infant either. But they both looked at the little guy with so much love. It was strange to see the person who’d made my life miserable for so long this caring and vulnerable. Madison had been good at everything without even trying. But I guess even Madison was no match for ten pounds of screaming, spit-covered, easily damaged newborn.

I wondered if my own mom had been anything like that when I was a baby. If she and my dad had looked at me with that same expression of dopey, helpless, animal love. If anyone would ever love me like that again. Nox. I shoved that thought into a closet at the back of my brain and slammed the door. Nox had made his choice and I didn’t blame him. I knew Oz would always come first in his heart. If I felt that strongly about a place, I’d put it before people, too. Maybe I just wasn’t meant to have a home. But the least I could do was help Nox save his.

“What are you thinking, Amy?” Madison, having secured Dustin Jr. in his baby wrap again, was looking at me. “You look like you went to another planet. A really, like, sad planet.”

“Nothing,” I said, a little too sharply. But she didn’t seem to mind.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know all about that.” For a second I wanted to snap at her. What did Madison know about real sadness? And then I thought of what her life must be like now, how her so-called friends had bailed on her the second she’d turned into a teen-mom warning story, and I realized that Madison probably knew a lot more about suffering than I gave her credit for.

After-school detention was a motley collection of the school’s biggest losers (whose number I probably would’ve counted among even if I hadn’t offered to serve out my sentence): a couple of potheads, a guy I recognized from one of my classes junior year who was always getting in fights in the halls, and a girl with a bleach-blond ratty perm and stonewashed jeans straight out of 1997 who rolled her eyes at me as I eagerly accepted my vacuum cleaner and dust rag. The shop teacher, Mr. Stone, handed out supplies to my fellow detainees, and then mumbled instructions so low that he might as well have been speaking another language. Just then, the door swung open and Dustin walked in. <