Yellow Brick War by Danielle Paige

totally wrong. Dustin obviously had no clue how to deal with an infant either. But they both looked at the little guy with so much love. It was strange to see the person who’d made my life miserable for so long this caring and vulnerable. Madison had been good at everything without even trying. But I guess even Madison was no match for ten pounds of screaming, spit-covered, easily damaged newborn.
    I wondered if my own mom had been anything like that when I was a baby. If she and my dad had looked at me with that same expression of dopey, helpless, animal love. If anyone would ever love me like that again.
Nox.
I shoved that thought into a closet at the back of my brain and slammed the door. Nox had made his choice and I didn’t blame him. I knew Oz would always comefirst in his heart. If I felt that strongly about a place, I’d put it before people, too. Maybe I just wasn’t meant to have a home. But the least I could do was help Nox save his.
    â€œWhat are you thinking, Amy?” Madison, having secured Dustin Jr. in his baby wrap again, was looking at me. “You look like you went to another planet. A really, like, sad planet.”
    â€œNothing,” I said, a little too sharply. But she didn’t seem to mind.
    â€œYeah,” she said. “I know all about that.” For a second I wanted to snap at her. What did Madison know about real sadness? And then I thought of what her life must be like now, how her so-called friends had bailed on her the second she’d turned into a teen-mom warning story, and I realized that Madison probably knew a lot more about suffering than I gave her credit for.
    After-school detention was a motley collection of the school’s biggest losers (whose number I probably would’ve counted among even if I
hadn’t
offered to serve out my sentence): a couple of potheads, a guy I recognized from one of my classes junior year who was always getting in fights in the halls, and a girl with a bleach-blond ratty perm and stonewashed jeans straight out of 1997 who rolled her eyes at me as I eagerly accepted my vacuum cleaner and dust rag. The shop teacher, Mr. Stone, handed out supplies to my fellow detainees, and then mumbled instructions so low that he might as well have been speaking another language. Just then, the door swung open and Dustin walked in.
    â€œHi, Amy,” he said. “We should—”
    â€œNo socializing!” Mr. Stone said, coming to life a little. Dustin apologized and accepted his bottle of glass cleaner. “Help Gumm with the science classrooms,” Mr. Stone added.
    â€œActually, sir, I thought we could clean the library,” Dustin said innocently. “That was my job last time. I’m a real expert.”
    Mr. Stone stared at Dustin as if he was up to something—which, of course, he was. Sort of. But Dustin just looked back with a vacant, innocent expression. I had to look away or else I’d start cracking up.
    â€œFine,” Mr. Stone growled. “But I’ll be checking up on you. Any hanky-panky . . .” He stopped short and then flushed red. One of the potheads snickered and sneezed the name of a venereal disease.
    â€œThat’s enough!” Mr. Stone barked. “For that, you’re on bathroom duty, Carson.” Mr. Stone tossed Dustin a set of keys, and I hid another smile as I followed him to the library.
    I’d never spent any time in the high school library. From what I could tell, nobody else had either. Dustin unlocked the door to what was more or less a glorified janitor’s closet: a tiny, windowless room full of rusting metal shelves crammed with books that hadn’t been new when my mom was going to school here. It looked like the shelves hadn’t been dusted since the last time Dustin served detention. The sad little book display arranged on a tiny table near the door was springtime-themed—despite the fact that it was October. There wasn’t