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dangerous.”
    His left eyebrow curled down like it did when he was about to lose his patience. “I want you to take in what I said, and I want you to agree to it.”
    â€œSure,” I said. “But you don’t have to worry about me. I’m really good at taking care of myself.”
    â€œI know,” he said softly, looking down at his plate. As though he regretted that fact.

CHAPTER 2
    Lila
    I was used to moving around. All my stuff fit in the same ugly brown suitcase I’d had since I was twelve, when my parents died and I had to leave the farm where I’d grown up, north of Cedar Falls. I’d switched foster homes seven times in six years, and sometimes I didn’t even unpack. But this move was different. I was leaving Iowa, and I wouldn’t be coming back.
    My social worker, who’d been telling me from day one that teenagers rarely got adopted, had tried to prepare me for aging out of the system. I was actually looking forward to it until it happened to my foster sister, Crystal. She was a year older and we’d shared a bedroom at the Humphries’ house. My parents wouldn’t have approved of Crystal, who was always ditching school and talking back, but the two of us had something that bonded us together: No one wanted to keep us for very long, not even people like the Humphries, who took in disabled kids and crack babies.
    Crystal said we got moved around so much because we were pretty and had big boobs, that foster moms didn’t want us tempting their husbands and sons, but in Crystal’s case it might also have had something to do with her habit of setting things on fire. She was partly right about me. It wasn’t my fault if my foster fathers or brothers had roving eyes, if they looked at me inappropriately. I never purposely flirted with them, though I did sometimes flirt with their friends or neighbors. I might have even slept with one or two. And gotten caught. (Cue suitcase.) The social worker called it a problem with impulse control. I’d done something else, too, after my parents died, something worse. I didn’t know for sure if it was in my file, but if it was, I couldn’t blame them for passing me around like a hot potato.
    Crystal had lightened the mood at the Humphries’ house, always mocking our foster mother’s obsession with modesty. Mrs. Humphries bought us sports bras to mash down our breasts, even insisting we wear them to sleep. Crystal would jump up and down on her bed, topless, waving around the Bible Mrs. Humphries had given her and quoting the crazy mom from the Carrie movie: I can see your dirty pillows! It always cracked us up.
    When Crystal turned eighteen, she dropped out of school and moved from Cedar Falls to Des Moines to work at a strip club. She wrote me a letter and invited me to join her, and I thought about it. Then I didn’t get any more letters. Six months later, I learned that Crystal had died of an overdose. The social worker gave me a moment to let the news sink in, then launched into her scared-straight routine, pushing up the sleeves of her blue blazer, the one she’d been wearing since I met her in 1986, when giant shoulder pads were in style.
    What have you done to prepare yourself, to keep from ending up like her? she asked, her eyes bulging. All these years I’ve been trying to get through to you. You’re too busy moping about your old life to plan for a new one. Your old life is gone, and you’ll never get it back! She was so worked up, she was yelling. Little drops of spit flew out of her mouth. I wanted to punch her in the face. I curled my fingers into a fist.
    She tossed a stack of pamphlets at me. You have nothing. NOTHING. Nobody’s going to take care of you but you. YOUR PARENTS WOULD WANT SOMETHING GOOD FOR YOU. Figure it out. You’re running out of time.
    I wondered if she said the same thing to everyone—to Crystal, whose parents were still alive and,