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brother.
    Only then would I open my eyes and begin searching the piles of rocks for a familiar scrap of clothing or the glint of the dying sunlight off a pair of glasses somewhere deep in the shadows below.
    And the spell would be broken. I was no longer queen of the quarry. I was the parent, tugging on his shirt and promising him things if he would come up to the top with me; my older brother was the child.
    For me, Newman Quarry always felt like broken spellsand frustration and harsh, ugly reality. Our family’s personal hiding place.
    Which, I guess, was why it made so much sense for me to go there, even though I never had gone on my own before. My backpack was still strapped on and pinned between my back and the driver’s seat, the image of Mr. Floodsay rifling through my writing journal and history books fresh in my mind.
    I don’t think I was intentionally going there. Probably, had you asked me, I would have told you I was going home. And then, when I passed the turnoff into my neighborhood, I might have said I was “going for a drive.”
    I don’t even think I realized I was pulling off the highway onto the outer road until I’d rolled around to the hilly side of the quarry, my tires crackling on the dirt, which got rockier and rockier as the road became more secluded. I hit a pothole and Hunka’s glove compartment door dropped open. I reached over without even thinking—Hunka’s glove box opened on its own a hundred times a week—and closed it.
    I pulled off the road, right in the same spot where my parents had parked the minivan a million times before.
    And I sat there. I squeezed my eyes shut, hard, then opened them wide. No tears. Just… numbness.
    Weird. I was expecting tears. Expected my eyes, like Bryn’s, to be tired and swollen and red, maybe a hitch in my breath as I berated myself over and over again for how stupid I’d been. I expected… something, at least.
    I unsnapped my seat belt, leaned forward, and shimmied out of my backpack, tossing it into the backseat. I reached into my front pocket and palmed my cell phone, which had buzzed three times while I was driving. I glanced at the screen—it was Shani—and then tossed it, too, into the backseat with my backpack. Then I opened the driver’s door and got out.
    For a few minutes I stood, my fingers laced through the holes in the chain link, resting my face against the inside of my right elbow, which hung at face level.
    “What now?” I breathed into the hollow of my chest. Here I was, three weeks before finals… four weeks before
graduation…
and I was about to lose everything. “What do I do now?”
    No answer came to me, but the gooseflesh that popped out on my arms spurred me to action anyway. Ignoring the spring chill creeping in around me, I moved my fingers from the holes they were in to holes much higher, gripped tightly, stuffed a toe into a hole at about knee height, and leaped up, pulling myself most of the way to the top of the fence in one motion.
    Even though it’d been months since I’d last been here, the climb was like second nature to me. Fingers here, toes there. Watch the sharp, clipped edges of the fence at the top. Swing over the right leg, balance, swing over the left leg, balance, and then push off. But not too far—you didn’t want to tumble, ass over teakettle, as my dad always used to say, down the quarry wall.
    Once inside, I stood at the edge of the steep decline,watching the toes of my shoes kick loose gravel over the edge and down, down, down, taking more rocks with it as it went.
    I closed my eyes. Turned my face to the sun. Felt the breeze, always blowing at the top of Newman Quarry, muss my hair. I let my arms hang limp at my sides. I took a deep breath. Queen of… nothing. Just like always.
    Queen of less than nothing now.
    I stood there for a long time. The earth did not split and swallow me up. No lava burbled out and melted me, eyeballs and teeth and hair, into a red river. Sediment did not