"I don't know why I said that." Kenzie's voice was muffled by her knees. "I heard Brooklyn's mom say it once. About Brooklyn's brother when he wrecked his car. You can earn more. It sounded like a grown-up thing to say. Like it meant it was okay."
"It's not okay."
"I know."
"I stood in front of a fryer for eleven weeks, Kenzie. I burned my arm. Look." She shoved up the hoodie sleeve and held out her wrist, the pink matchstick scar. "I cleaned out the grease trap. You know what's in a grease trap? I babysat the Lindgren twins and one of them bit me. I missed the Fourth of July. I missed Hailey's birthday. I missed literally everything this summer so I could go to a thing I'm going to have to go to by myself, a hundred and forty miles away, and nobody in this family is even going to drive me there, probably. And you stood in the doorway and said I can earn more. Like it was nothing. Like I was nothing."
Kenzie was crying now, silently, her face pressed into her knees. Maeve watched her shoulders shake. Part of her, the four-year-old part, the part that had held a baby in a hospital bed, wanted to get down on the floor and put her arms around her. She didn't. She stayed where she was, against the wall. It was the first time in her life she had not gone to her sister when her sister cried, and it felt terrible, and it felt necessary, and she could not have said which feeling was bigger.
After a while Kenzie lifted her face. Her nose was running. She wiped it on the shirt.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"Okay."
"Are you going to forgive me?"
Maeve thought about it. She wanted to tell the truth.
"Not tonight," she said.
Kenzie nodded, as if that were a fair answer, as if she had expected it. She got up off the floor. At the door she stopped with her hand on the knob.
"Are you really going to go somewhere a hundred and forty miles away?"
"For six weeks. Next summer."
"By yourself?"