“No. You?”

“No.”

I moved ahead, my heart pound­ing woe­ful­ly.

“Typ­ical Thomas,” Josh said un­der his breath.

“What?” I asked.

31

“Noth­ing. It's just . . . you'd think he'd at least let you know where he's go­ing,” he said with ma­j

or em­pha­sis on the you. So he did know what Thomas and I had done. Or he sus­pect­ed. Or maybe not. Maybe he just knew I meant a lot to Thomas. At least, I thought I did.

How was it that our re­la­tion­ship was even more con­fus­ing with­out him here than it was when he was around?

“But I should have known,” Josh con­tin­ued. “He's nev­er been one for think­ing of oth­er peo­ple.”

I swal­lowed hard. This morn­ing had al­ready been too much for me to han­dle. I didn't need to add “pick­ing apart my miss­ing boyfriend” to the list. “Let's talk about some­thing else,” I said.

“Right. Sor­ry,” he told me with an apolo­get­ic smile. “I'm sure he'll call you. Even­tu­al­ly.”

Feel­ing warm and con­spic­uous, I glanced around for a new top­ic.

“So what's all that?” I asked, ges­tur­ing at his tray. It was piled even high­er than my own two. “Bulk­ing up for win­ter?”

“Nah. Some of the guys were still hun­gry, so ...” He shrugged.

“I don't get it,” I said.

“Get what?” he asked, lift­ing a choco­late-?chip muf­fin on­to the tray.

“Why are you al­ways do­ing stuff for them? ” I said. “It's not like you have to.”

Like some peo­ple.

“I have four younger broth­ers and sis­ters and on­ly one old­er broth­er, who was al­ler­gic to help­ing out,” he replied, shov­ing his

32

hand in­to the back pock­et of his bag­gy, paint-?stained jeans as he pushed his tray for­ward on the slide rail with the oth­er. “I think do­ing stuff for peo­ple is hard­wired in­to my brain.”

I picked up a bowl for ce­re­al. “Ah.”

“Why do you do it?” he asked.

“Uh, they make me,” I said au­to­mat­ical­ly.

Josh eyed me du­bi­ous­ly. “Huh?”

I blinked. He didn't know? He didn't know I was an in­den­tured ser­vant of Billings House? I thought this was pub­lic knowl­edge, this sys­tem­at­ic haz­ing. At least the stuff I'd done be­fore I had moved in had been no­ticed by oth­ers. Dash, in par­tic­ular, had made it clear that he en­joyed my suf­fer­ing. How could Josh not know?

“Wait. What're they mak­ing you do?” he asked.

Red alert. Flash­ing lights. Yel­low cau­tion tape. If he didn't know, maybe he wasn't sup­posed to know.

Fuck.

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