Chapter 1

Zoey

December 14th was Zoey Daniels’ eighteenth birthday.

Her mother made her favorite breakfast and her father came downstairs in his good shirt on a Tuesday, which he only did when something mattered. The small wrapped box beside her orange juice was a bracelet she’d pointed at in October and assumed he hadn’t noticed. He’d noticed.

She was a good kid and they both knew it and mornings like this one were their way of saying so without making it awkward.

Zoey was a senior at Jefferson High. She carried a 3.9 GPA, sat second row in every class because the light was better there, and was the kind of student her teachers mentioned by name when they wanted to make a point about what serious work looked like. She wasn’t a grind about it. She just cared about getting things right.

She was pretty in a way that wasn’t manufactured. Biracial, her father Black and her mother white, she’d gotten the best of both — warm brown skin, dark eyes, cheekbones her grandmother called a gift, hair she’d negotiated a peace treaty with somewhere around tenth grade. Boys had been noticing her since ninth grade and making their intentions clear since tenth. She wasn’t cold about it. She just wasn’t interested in what most of them were after, which was getting her into bed as fast as she’d allow.