"Sure," Junie said. "Why wouldn't she be?"
Pearl looked at her for a long moment. Then she reached up and tucked a piece of Junie's hair behind her ear, the way she had when Junie was small enough to sit on the cutting table and hand her pins.
"Text me when you get there," she said. "Not eventually. When."
* * *
The house on Larkspur Court had been Junie's house for all sixteen years of her life, and for the last three of them it had felt like a hotel where she was staff.
She came in through the garage, because the front door was for guests and for Dana, and stood for a second in the mudroom listening. The television was on in the den, a dating show, the kind with a lot of crying on beaches. Upstairs, music. Kenzie's music, which meant Kenzie's door was open, which meant Kenzie wanted to be seen doing something.
The mudroom shared a wall with the laundry room, and the laundry room was where Junie slept.
It had not started that way. When Dana and her daughters first moved in, Junie had still had her own room, the one at the top of the stairs with the slanted ceiling and the glow-in-the-dark stars her mother had stuck up there in the shape of real constellations, because Rose Hale did not believe in fake ones. Then Dana had said, reasonably, the way she said everything at first, that it might be nice for Kenzie to have the bigger room since she was older, and Junie could have the sewing room, and wasn't that a fair trade, since Junie liked sewing so much? And Junie's father had said that sounded fair, if Junie was okay with it, and Junie, who was thirteen and wanted more than anything for her father to stop looking so tired, said she was okay with it.
Then the sewing room became Kenzie's closet, because Kenzie had a lot of clothes and the house was old and the closets were small. And for a few months Junie slept on the pullout in the den, which Dana said was temporary, until they figured something out. And then her father had taken a job with the storm restoration crew, the one that paid double and sent him wherever the weather had knocked the power out, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, three weeks gone and one week home, because the new house payment and the new car payment and Kenzie's cheer fees added up. And while he was in Pensacola, Dana had figured something out.
The laundry room was nine feet by seven. It had a window high up near the ceiling that looked at the side of the Porters' fence. It had the washer and the dryer and a utility sink, and against the far wall, a twin mattress on a metal frame with a quilt Pearl had made. Dana called it Junie's suite. She said it to company, smiling. Junie's suite, she has her own space, she likes the privacy, teenagers.
Junie's father had seen it exactly once, the first time he came home after, and he had stood in the doorway and said, "Junie, bug, is this—" and Dana had come up behind him and slid her arms around his waist and said, "She picked it. Didn't you, hon? She said the den was too noisy with the TV." And Junie had looked at her father's face, at the gray that had come into his beard that year and the way he'd started sleeping in his recliner because the bed was too big, or too small, or too something, and she had said, "Yeah. It's fine. I like it."
That was the first lie. After that they got easier.
She went in now and closed the door and checked the dress first, before she did anything else. It hung where she'd left it, on a hook she'd screwed into the back of the door herself, inside its plastic bag. Through the plastic it looked like something underwater. She unzipped the bag a few inches and touched the shoulder seam just to touch it.
Then she sat on the bed and texted Pearl. Here. Not eventually.