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She never made it home.

Sage was in PE when the principal appeared in the gym doorway and asked for her specifically. Sage rolled her eyes, no stranger to the principal’s office for various acts of rebellion. But something in the woman's face told her everything before a single word was spoken. The office felt empty. The fluorescent lights buzzed. She watched the principal's mouth move and heard the words. "accident" and "your mother" and "I'm so sorry” in pieces, the words arriving out of order, her brain refusing to assemble them into a sentence she'd have to live with.

“Where is she.”

Not a question. Flat. Her voice from a long distance away.

“The hospital. But Sage, she's⁠—”

“I need to see her.”

They told her no at first. Too much damage, they said. She needed to be prepared. She stood in the hospital corridor and stared at the attending physician and said, “Show me my fucking mom now or I’ll fucking kill you.”

I have seen things that would make you physically ill. Show me my mom now!

And something in her face made him step aside.

The morgue was cold. They pulled back the sheet. Felicity's face was intact, almost peaceful, like she'd just closed her eyes for a moment. The rest of it — the rest of it told the story of what the impact had done, and Sage looked at it because she needed to, because her brain required the evidence, because she'd spent years learning not to look away from unbearable things.

She turned. Threw up. Fainted.

She woke up in a hospital bed with a social worker in the chair beside her and a sedative wearing off in her bloodstream. The gray quality of light that meant it was the following morning and she had missed something that she couldn't get back.

“You turn eighteen in a few weeks,” the woman said, careful and kind in the way of someone delivering a specific kind of bad news. Do you have family? Somewhere to go?

Sage stared at the ceiling. The tiles were different here. She didn't count them.

“Fuck you,” she said.

She had no one.

Felicity had forty-three coworkers at Phoenix General. Sage knew this because she'd sat in the break room enough times waiting for Felicity's shift to end, counting the names on the birthday board above the coffee machine. Forty-three people who worked alongside her, who borrowed her pens and ate her leftovers from the communal fridge and complained about the same difficult patients.

Twelve of them came to the funeral.

Sage stood at the graveside in black goth regalia like armor and watched them file past the casket with their folded hands and their sorry-for-your-loss faces, and felt nothing. Not because she didn't love Felicity. Because she loved her so much that her body had simply run out of ways to express it and had gone quiet instead, the way a fire dies when it runs out of things to burn.

She'd spent the $800 in Felicity's savings account on the cheapest package the funeral home offered. It wasn't enough and it was everything there was. She'd stood at the counter and handed over the debit card and the woman behind the desk had looked at her with sympathy. Sage had looked back with the same empty eyes she'd first developed at twelve, standing at kitchen sinks, counting ceiling tiles, waiting for things to be over.

“Thank you for coming,” she said to the twelve people, one by one, at the graveside.

She drove home alone. Made herself a bowl of cereal. Sat on the floor of the apartment because the couch still smelled like Felicity's shampoo and she couldn't sit on it yet, couldn't let herself have that, not tonight.

She didn't cry.

The tears were simply gone. She'd used them all up somewhere and she had no idea how to make more.

The eviction notice came three weeks later, slid under the door on a Wednesday morning while she was still in her sleeping bag on the floor. One week. She lay there and read it twice and then set it down on the floor next to her and stared at the ceiling — different ceiling, different apartment — but her eyes found the same patterns they always did, the same habit of cataloguing, counting, waiting.

One week.

She packed methodically, the way she'd packed the night Felicity grabbed the crowbar; efficiently, without sentiment, taking only what mattered. Three sketchbooks filled edge to edge with charcoal. Her art supplies. Her guitar. Every piece of clothing she owned. Shadow — the small stuffed bear she clutched as a little girl through the darkest nights — tucked into the top of the backpack where she could reach him.

The University of Utah acceptance letter. She didn't know why she took it. Habit, maybe. Evidence that she'd once been someone a panel of strangers believed in.

Felicity's note, folded and refolded until the creases had gone soft. I believe in you, baby girl. Go live loud. She put that in her jacket pocket, close.

The Jeep was in the lot where it always was — a '98 Cherokee the color of dried mud that Felicity had helped her buy a year ago, talking the owner down fifty dollars and then high-fiving herself about it for a week. It started on the third try, which was normal. She pulled out of the parking lot and pointed it north and drove.