Page 46 of The Wrong Track

“Just water,” I said, but he shook his head.

“Also a burger, fries, and—chocolate or vanilla?” he asked me.

“What?”

“I don’t know which one you like better. I’ve never seen you eat dessert.”

“I like chocolate better,” I said, and he finished up our order by requesting a chocolate shake for me.

“I can’t eat all that,” I said after we’d found a table that accommodated Ella’s car seat.

“I’ll finish it for you,” he assured me, but I knew that I shouldn’t have eaten even a bite of it. But when they called our number, everything looked and smelled so good that I kind of fell on the food, inhaling it, and drinking the chocolate shake like I’d never tasted one. Which I hadn’t in the previous four years, because I hadn’t been allowed.

“It’s funny that I didn’t know what flavor you like the best,” Tobin said. He picked up my cup and sipped. “Agricultural inspection,” he explained that away. “Police business.”

“Help yourself,” I invited.

“I do know your middle name, but there are probably a lot of other things that I don’t know about you,” he said as he put down the shake.

Yes. Yes, there were. I sat, waiting for him to start shooting out questions that I didn’t want to answer.

“What was your first word?”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“What was the first thing that you said as a baby? I’ve been reading about babbling and I guess ‘dada’ usually comes before ‘mama.’ My mom told me that my first real word was ‘shoe.’ She thought it was because I wanted to go outside a lot, and she said it sounded more like ‘sue’ but she knew exactly what I meant.”

“Maybe you were trying to tell her that you were coming after her legally,” I noted, and he laughed. “I don’t know my first word. I would bet that my mom doesn’t have it written down anywhere, either. She was always very busy. Maybe my grandma would have known.”

“Grandma Margaret.”

I nodded. “But she died when I was eight, so we can’t ask her.” Not that she’d have been speaking to me now, anyway.

“What was your sister’s first word?”

I thought back, reviewing those distant memories. “I don’t know that, either. I wish I did.”

“I saw you that you were looking her up on my computer. You left the window open,” he explained. “It was the Sidsworth Hall Preparatory Academy website, and I saw her name. I wasn’t trying to snoop around.”

I nodded.

“That’s where she goes? Is that where you went, too? It seems like a fancy place.”

I nodded again. It was.

“Did you like it? Does she?”

“I don’t know how Lily feels about it. I dropped out before she ever started there.”

“Why’d you leave?”

I shook my head. “Why do you need to know that? What difference does it make now?”

“I’m just making conversation,” he told me. “Go ahead and eat.”

But the food was tasteless and I felt a little sick. I pushed the rest of the burger toward him. “Go ahead,” I echoed, and after watching me for a moment, he did pick up and finish my food.

There was so much about me that Tobin didn’t need to know, four years of nasty, unhappy crap that I didn’t want to tell him. Everything that had happened at Sidsworth Hall was part of it. I pushed the rest of the chocolate shake toward him too, and I thought I’d better be more careful. Losing his friendship was something I wouldn’t be able to live with, so he could never find out. Never.