They tell you about the palm trees.

On the Travel Esperanza website, I mean.

As far as tourist attractions go, they're right up there with the Castillo di Bianchi in the hills, the Malecón keeping the Pacific at bay, the eighteenth-century boarding school we were sneaking back into, and the mutilated mission church from which we'd escaped.

"Are you happy now? Is this what you wanted?" Daphne wanted to know, sniffing back mascara-black tears.

It was hard to hear her, and not only because she was whispering so as not to be overheard by our friends, who walked ahead of us in various states of trauma. My heart was pounding like it wanted to jump into my throat and out of my mouth.

"What do you mean?" I choked out.

Only it hadn't sounded like my voice at all. I wasn't even sure my lips had moved.

It was like I was stuck in a dream where nothing was real. I was completely numb to the feeling of my white cheer shoes stained with mud, urine—and was that vomit?!—slapping against the dark flagstone streets.

How had we walked from the church on the outskirts of town to the art district so quickly?

Was this what being in shock felt like?

I didn't know.

All I could think about was the Fort Roscoe page I'd stalked on the Army's website when my dad had first gotten orders to move to Esperanza.

And do you know what had sat at the top of every sub-page?

A banner with a bright blue sky and a sun so blinding it pierced right through all those tall, green palm trees.

Esperanza City: Your Gateway to Paradise, it had said.

No one had ever mentioned the protests.

Or the riots.

Or the freaking rebels!

You'd think they would have. 

Mentioned them, that is. 

It's kind of an important detail.

Only, not one person on the website's message boards or the tour during freshman year orientation had the decency to pull me aside and say, "Stay away from the cafeteria's main lunch line. Oh, and watch out for the rebels."

Daphne reached out and grabbed my arm, forcing me to stop directly in front of the Esperanza City Museum. Crescent moon-shaped marks etched themselves into my arm as her long gold manicure dug into my skin. They reminded me of the type of bullets you might find in a rifle. I shivered.

"You almost got us killed back there! And for what? So you could simp over a guy who doesn't even know you exist!"

"It wasn't like that!" I protested.

And it wasn't.

Not in the beginning.

"What? Like this?" She motioned around us, calling attention to the jarring gurgle of stomach acid hitting the concrete as Myles puked for the third time that night.

Daphne was right; she had been from the very beginning.

But that's the thing about beginnings. No matter how many times a story is told, hearing that first sentence will always make you wish for a different outcome.

It will always make you pull that 20/20 hindsight, jump-up-and-scream-at-the television-screen, and warn-the-unsuspecting-victim move even though you know that there is nothing you can do. The damage is done, and by the time anyone realizes the danger, the poor fool in need of saving is too far gone.

Or maybe that was me.

Perhaps I was in a nostalgic mood, living in the past because the present was so screwed up that I needed to revisit yesterday to figure out how today got this way.

"If I had known we would spend the last night of junior year hiding in a church covered in Myles-freaking-Mendel, I never would have dragged us out here."

"Save the excuses for someone who gives a shit, Pickmeisha," she said with a bitter frown. "'Cause it sure as hell ain't me."

She shoulder checked me, knocking me off balance as she jogged ahead to catch up with an uncharacteristically silent Jordan.

And a part of me wanted to stay in that alley, to curl up in a ball and cry until morning came and brought my sister with it.

But as much as I'd wanted to hide, I needed my friends more.

I needed Caylee crying on Chase's shoulder and Eric's morbid interest in whether Myles had eaten corn earlier that day.

I needed Gesse's whispered hiss for everyone to shut up as she leaned over to rub Myles' back.

And as crazy as it sounds, I needed Daphne's anger. Because this was all my fault.

But most of all, I needed Jordan's quiet determination to get us all back to school safely.

So, I trudged behind my friends and obsessed over palm trees and travel websites.

As I did so, I pretended to distance myself from the one place that had made all the trouble of these past three months worth it.

The one place that had started it all...