Zoe obeyed. Back in her room, she closed her door, sat on her bed and rubbed her face.

It took a while to register how much trouble she was in. She wished she could go online and find her friends for some support. She winced when the impossibility of this ran into her like a brick wall. How could she have been so stupid to trust Elise's idea about the water? She was mad at her mother, but she was mad at herself too, for her carelessness.

And there was that tinge of guilt. She had never spoke so openly about her father, not even to her friends, let alone to the poor woman married to him. She hadn't even known for sure if her father was cheating on her mother, but it seemed to be a lucky guess in retrospect, judging from the shattered expression on her mother's face. When she was younger, Zoe thought that nothing she could say or do could hurt her parents. She knew this was not the case now, but she never had any idea how much she had the power to harm them. All it took was a little bit of truth.

Zoe found herself throwing clothes into her bookbag even before she consciously decided to run away. Looking at her bag half-stuffed with sweaters and hoodies, she decided that it was, in fact, a good idea. She needed some time, some space, to work out her conflicting emotions. She was trapped here in her room, with no computer and no phone. She was trapped in this house, in this relationship with her mother that she had just now irrevocably ruined. She needed some place to breathe.

An hour had already passed since the encounter. When she was sure her mother was fast asleep, Zoe opened her window and climbed out. The aluminum siding stung her fingers with cold. Her house was a split-level, and she had climbed out her window a few times before, but she never remembered it being this cold. She rubbed her hands together when she touched ground and pulled her hoodie tightly around her head.

She tiptoed onto the front porch, grabbed her red bike, and rode off into the night.