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“For sexual addiction,” Rusty added, staring at her ceiling. She sighed again.

“Wow,” Suzi said again, thinking how peculiar it was for a daughter to be talking about her father this way. A minister with sex-u-al addiction. What did this mean? That he couldn’t help himself? Again, in a way that Suzi knew was sick and twisted, this gave her hope. But she didn’t want to know more.

“What were you doing in here?” she asked Rusty.

Rusty rolled over and pulled a book from under the bed. “I bring in one book at a time, and when I’m done, take it out and bring in another. Usually I get them from the library. Otis gave me this one. It’s scintillating.” She held up an old white paperback book called Atoms to Electricity.

“How do you know Otis?” Suzi asked, but she was wondering, Would she be able to hear Angel if she woke up?

“Night, night, Suze,” Rusty said, flopping back on the bed. “Enough questions for now.”

* * *

The following Wednesday Suzi stayed late after youth group and watched as Buff cleaned up. All the other kids had left. Buff was supposed to give her and Ava a ride home, but Ava, of course, wouldn’t lower herself to attend youth group. Buff was rearranging beanbag chairs in the chat room, scooping them up and slinging them into a corner, while Suzi, because of her knee, sat on a folding chair and watched. The muscles in his back and arms rippled under his white T-shirt as he bent over and picked up the multicolored beanbags.

He was scowling. He’d been acting annoyed all evening. When one of the smaller boys, Nick, banged his elbow against a cabinet and doubled over in pain, Buff had told him to get over it. When one of the girls, Jackie, went on and on during check-in about a fight with her friend, he’d said, “That’s lame.”

“Where’s Ava tonight?” he finally asked Suzi, kicking the beanbags into a mound. “Did we do something to scare her away?”

“You did,” Suzi said boldly. “She doesn’t like you.”

Buff hesitated, glancing up at Suzi as if he were going to say something, then changed his mind. He snatched up the last beanbag chair, the one with a hole in it, and heaved it at the wall, and when it hit beans rattled out.

“But I do,” Suzi said, her heart popping away like a string of firecrackers. “I mean, I like you.” She hoped Buff understood what she was trying to tell him.

“I like you, too,” Buff said, not meeting her eyes. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the room.

Suzi knew what kind of like he was referring to. Pals. Buddies. “No, not that kind of like,” she blurted out. “I like like you.”

He finally turned, looking her up and down. “What exactly are you saying, honey?”

Why was he making this so hard? “You know.”

He shook his head. “Okay, I know. But you don’t know. You’re younger than my daughter.”

“Your daughter hates you.” Because of all her sparring with Ava, Suzi had a knack for saying just the right thing at the right time, or maybe it was the wrong thing, depending on how you looked at it. But either way, her words usually had the effect she desired.

Buff walked over to the food table, where bowls of tortilla chip crumbs and plates of cookie crumbs waited to be taken to the kitchen. Buff slammed the table into the wall. “Wait for me in my office,” he told Suzi.

Suzi stepped out of the chat room and stood a moment in the great hall, and she felt like cartwheeling across the cavernous room, dancing and whirling. She would have done it except for her lame knee. Ha-ha-ha, she was thinking, for some reason. Na, na, na. So there. She had no idea to whom these thoughts were addressed.

It seemed too good to be true, the morning that Suzi came knocking at her door. Marylou was wary about answering, because nobody ever rang the bell except Jehovah’s Witnesses and the person who was harassing her, the coward who’d always run away by the time Marylou could step outside to look around.

Suzi had an eerie look on her face. She’d hobbled all the way over to Marylou’s house on her bad knee,