PROLOGUE

GO GO GO go go go!

The chant was in my head, because I didn’t have enough breath in my lungs to make sound. I was too busy pushing my bike up a killer beast of an incline, churning my legs against the pedals like my life depended on it. Which it did. Ordinarily, I might relish the burn in my chest, the rubbery feelings in my thighs, the buttwhupping high of a challenging ride. But this situation was anything but ordinary. In the thick dark of the desert night, I was fighting against gravity and space, and my body was losing.

For the millionth time, I was reminded that my vintage cruiser wasn’t built for this desert terrain. Someday, when I got my driver’s license, I’d speed through these back roads no problem, just like Aidan in his dad’s Porsche. That is, if I actually made it out of here.

Still, I kept moving, breathing hard, and leaning forward to urge my old bike on. The wind whipped against my hoodie, taunting me with its ease. Coyotes called to each other in the distance, their high-pitched whimpering like balloons losing air. Or was that the sound of fate catching up to me?

I am so completely dead, I thought.

As I approached the top of the hill, the view opened up to a thick carpet of shrubs on either side of the asphalt, the silhouettes of craggy mountains in the distance, and the inky evening sky hovering over it all. Here and there were the lights of houses tucked into the darkness, but beyond that, there was little sign of life. The emptiness I’d loved so much about the Arizona desert now seemed less like a promise and more like a threat.

Doubt was creeping in. How long could I keep this up? Even if I managed to escape, where was I going and what would I do when I got there?

I thought of Tre, how he’d made me promise to be careful. Believe me when I say that what you’re doing is just not worth it, Willa, he’d said. You’d get kicked out of Prep. I’m sure your parents would never forgive you. All of the possible consequences flashed in front of my eyes. The disappointment on my mom’s face. The disgust on Mr. Page’s as he told me I was expelled from school. Cherise shaking her head. Tre telling me he’d told me so. And there was Aidan, with his knowing smile—though for some strange reason, I felt like he, out of everyone, would understand why I’d done what I’d done.

But none of this could really happen to me, could it? I’d been so lucky so far. I just needed a tiny bit more luck to tide me over.

Please, God, I thought. Please just let me get away— just this once—and I promise I will never screw up ever, ever again. Just do me this one solid, God.

But even as I thought it, I knew that I didn’t have much pull with the Almighty. My mom was a pseudo-Buddhist and when she’d taken me to churches, it was to look at the architecture. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe, but my relationship with God, casual as it was, probably didn’t count for much when it came time to beg for favors. Not even now.

I was so deep in thought I hadn’t noticed that I’d hit the peak of the hill; the road had plateaued and I was on flat ground. It should have been cake. Something was wrong, though. My legs knew it before my brain did, because they were keeping pace yet I wasn’t gaining ground. It felt like I was slowing down, riding through quicksand.

Maybe it was fear or lack of oxygen, but in that moment my brain was slowing down, too, looping backward. I could no longer think about what came next. I could only think about how I had gotten to this point. How I ended up alone and trembling in the desert. How I’d come so close to losing everything.