I want to tell this part carefully, because it's the part of the story people ended up caring about the most, and also the part I've always been most reluctant to turn into a story at all. So I'll tell you only what matters, and I'll tell it the way I've decided it should be told: from the outside of the worst of it, looking in just far enough to explain what happened, and no farther.The girl's name, I'd learn later, was Sarah. She was a sophomore at a public school two towns over, not someone I knew, not someone Ashcroft had any claim on, which somehow made it worse in my head rather than better — the sense that whatever this man had planned for that alley had nothing at all to do with who she was, that she'd simply been walking home like I had been walking home, and the alley had simply been between her and wherever she was going.By the time I closed the distance, my borrowed legs eating up the last stretch of gravel, he had her pinned against the brick with one forearm, and she w

Millhaven's Guardian. The name stuck in a way "Hero of Millhaven" never quite had, and I noticed, in the weeks after Sarah's alley, that people had started saying it to my face without any apparent self-consciousness, the way you'd say someone's actual name rather than a nickname they might be embarrassed by."Guardian's in the building," a junior said to his friend, not quite under his breath, as I passed them at my locker, and they both laughed, but not unkindly — more the specific, delighted laugh of people getting to say something a little absurd about someone they'd decided, collectively, to be proud of.I want to describe what those weeks actually felt like from the inside, because from the outside, I understand, they must have looked like nothing but triumph — two saves in a month, national coverage, a hallway that rearranged itself every time I walked through it. From the inside, it felt more like a low, constant hum underneath everything else I did, a frequency I couldn't qui

We started spending most afternoons together after that, in the loose, unofficial way that becomes official whether or not anyone says the actual words out loud. Bianca never asked me to define it, and I never offered to, and somewhere in the space that silence left, we just became a thing people at Ashcroft referred to in the same breath — *Alex and Bianca*, said the way you'd say a phrase that had always belonged together, even though three months earlier nobody at that school could have told you Bianca Cole knew my name at all.I want to describe the good parts honestly, because there were real ones, and I don't want this account to make it sound like everything about that stretch of my life was rotten underneath. Bianca made me laugh in a register I hadn't used since before my parents died — not the careful, performed ease I'd learned to project in interviews, but something looser, sillier, entirely unguarded. She had a specific, delighted way of arguing about things that didn't m

Chloe tried the old material first, because that's what you do when your footing starts to slide — you reach for the thing that's always worked, even after it's stopped working, the way you'd keep reaching for a light switch in a room where the power's already gone out.It happened at lunch, on a Wednesday, in front of the same table that had spent the last month gradually reorganizing itself around me. I'd worn the same jacket two days running — a small, unremarkable fact, the kind of thing that would never have registered as ammunition before the lottery, back when everything I wore was ammunition simply by virtue of being cheap."Wow, Alex," Chloe said, loud enough to carry, the particular pitch she used when she wanted a whole table listening without appearing to perform for one. "Same jacket two days in a row? I thought forty million dollars would at least buy you a closet." A pause, timed for the laugh she expected. "Guess you can take the kid out of the woodpile shed, but you c

The lookout saw me first, a lanky kid maybe nineteen or twenty who couldn't have weighed much more than I did, and I watched his face do the thing faces did now when they recognized me — a flicker of confusion, fast-dawning recognition, and then, strangest of all, something that looked almost like relief, as though some part of him understood, even mid-crime, that being caught by the Guardian came with a certain built-in narrative that being caught by ordinary police somehow didn't."Oh, hell," he said, backing up a step. "Oh, hell, it's the—"I didn't let him finish. I want to describe this part honestly, because I think it's the moment where the difference between what I'd done at Milton's and what I was doing now became impossible to ignore, even by me. At Milton's, everything had happened in a blur of instinct and terror, my body moving faster than my thoughts could organize themselves around it. Here, I moved with something closer to choreography — a step that put me between the