CHAPTER 2
Damn Brax and his surprise. The wondering about it consumed Mia all day, distracting her from the class discussion on Heart of Darkness. She couldn’t even pay attention in physics—her favorite class. She enjoyed understanding how things worked in the physical world, and on a normal day, she could lose herself in the predictability of calculations. But today wasn’t normal. It crawled by with minutes that stretched like hours. Once or twice, she would have sworn the clock actually moved backward just to spite her.
What did he have planned? Neither of them had much money to speak of, and all of his needed to go to rent and bills and keeping him fed. Not that lack of funds had ever stopped him from making her birthday memorable. He always managed to come up with something that hit
