At the hospital, my wrist had been reset under local anesthesia. And they replaced the Real Simple magazine with a more official splint.

The ER doctor had marveled over how thick the magazine was. “Three hundred ninety-four pages!” She weighed it in her palm. “That’s got to be one of the thickest issues they ever printed. If you tried to stop a knife with a current magazine, it’d probably go right through.”

Even with my arm in a cast, I had kept coming to kung fu class. Sifu had modified the drills so that I could still participate.

“Right side thrust kicks on my count,” he said now. When I turned to my left, I was facing the two students testing for orange. Mr. Tae Kwan Do was no longer on the end. Jenny was. Her counselor had suggested it might be good for her to add to the kung fu I had already taught her that desperate day in the RV. She turned out to be a natural. Her long legs could snap kicks as high as a man’s head.

Daniel turned his shoulder to me and braced himself. His arms were threaded through the straps of the four-inch-thick pad that shielded him from shoulder to thigh.

“One,” Sifu said. As I drove my foot into the pad just over Daniel’s ribs, I didn’t hold anything back. He let out a grunt and took a half step back. “Two.” Jenny’s partner was also having trouble staying in place.

I snuck a glance over my shoulder at the audience. Jenny’s brother, Blake, was in the front row of folding chairs, sitting next to his parents. Amy and Bob Dowd were sitting together, with eyes only for their daughter. Jenny had said that her dad had moved home the week before.

A few seats down from them was Officer Diaz, Daniel’s father. Daniel had told me that he and his dad had some long talks after Daniel found us. Last week, I had watched Enter the Dragon at his house with his whole family. And when his dad caught us kissing in the kitchen when we were supposedly making popcorn, the three of us had all pretended that he hadn’t seen anything.

One person not in the room was Tim. My mom still saw him every now and then, but she no longer called him her boyfriend. She had told me a few things about his past that made me feel sorry for him. Last month, she passed on a handwritten note. In it, Tim apologized for his behavior and said he was in anger management counseling. He wrote that he was trying to learn what it meant to be a man. For her part, my mom was attending Co-Dependents Anonymous, which said that true happiness couldn’t come from another person.

She’d also promised that we wouldn’t leave Portland while I was still living at home. Because of the GoFundMe, I would have enough to make at least a start at college.

Sir, whose real name was Milton Thorne, was in jail awaiting trial. He’d had a fractured skull, but he’d healed up, just like me and Jenny. Everyone seemed certain he would receive a prison sentence so long that he would never get out. After we escaped, the police had searched the wrecking yard he owned for hidden graves, but they had turned up no evidence of earlier girls. It seemed Jenny had been his first and I was his last.

Milton might have been going to prison, but Rex was getting out. A rescue group in upstate New York that specialized in rehabbing vicious dogs had offered to take him. Despite what Rex had done to her face, Jenny hadn’t objected. The dog was what Milton had made him. Maybe he could be unmade, and maybe he couldn’t. But it didn’t seem fair not to give him a chance.

Sifu Terry clapped his hands. “Thank you, helpers. You may salute off the floor. And those of you who are testing should go to horse stance.” Then he and the other black belts left the room to confer.

I spread my feet and settled down into a low horse stance, my arms held up as if ready to block an imaginary blow. From my previous test, I knew the black belts would not come back for at least five minutes, long enough that my legs would be trembling.

But I was sure that they would stand up to the challenge. And I was also sure that when the black belts returned, Jenny and I would both be awarded rank. Without turning my head, I managed to catch her eye.

And then we grinned.