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.Kissing Jesse is totally amazing.It’s sweet, but passionate, and I pull away before I really want to, because I am afraid of what might happen if I don’t.I sigh.This is a moment.I feel electricity in my toenails.In my spleen.Radiating through my liver.I lean back into him, and we kiss again until my lips feel raw.That’s when the tornado sirens go off.“Damn it!” Jesse says, looking up at the sky.“We should head back to the car.” He grabs my hand, and we make a run for the car just as the sky opens up and spits out jagged pieces of hail.When we get to the car, he pauses at the trunk and quickly pulls a blanket out, which I assume he’s going to use to cover the seat of his black Mitsubishi Eclipse.I’m still pretty wet.Instead, he wraps the blanket tightly around me and gives me a warm hug.“Go ahead,” he says, guiding me into the passenger seat.“You’ll warm up quickly once we get the heat going.”The hail is coming down hard now, clapping loudly on the hood of his car.“I hope it doesn’t leave dents,” I say.“Me too.This is my dad’s car.” He turns quickly down a tree-lined street and accelerates to well over forty, the houses on the street turning into a blur.He slows and pulls into a driveway.“Your house?” I ask.“Closer than my house,” he says.“Mine is all the way up the hill.” He points behind us.He pulls the car around back, past the three-car garage, and under the old carport next to it.“Perfect,” he says.“Wanna go in the house?”We listen to the hail hammer on the roof of the carport.“Let’s wait a second,” I say.Then, “Whose house it?”“January’s.”Then I definitely don’t want to go inside.Yet when the wind picks up, and the lawn chairs from the deck start whipping across the yard, I know we have to make a run for the house.“Let’s go,” I say with resignation.A perfectly coiffed woman who smells like a medley of hyacinth, lemons, and money seems unsurprised to see us, as if she’s used to visitors popping up during hailstorms.Probably happens all the time in Oklahoma.She efficiently shepherds us to a large closet underneath the stairs, where she insists that we stay until we know for sure that we’ll be safe.There isn’t really enough room for all of us—Mrs.Morrison, Jesse, me, and Hillary, January’s little sister—but we manage.Mrs.Morrison calls me Deborah and makes me put on dry clothes before joining the group—“I don’t want you to get everything all wet, dear,” she says while turning her nose up at me.After I change into a faded T-shirt of January’s and a pair of red sweatpants that are far too tight, I take a minute in the half-bathroom off the kitchen to push my hair over the bald spot.I find a barrette in my damp purse and gently clip the hair in place.Not great, but at least I don’t look like the Swamp Thing’s twin.I stuff my hat into my purse.In the hallway, I notice rows of family pictures taken at lakes and Disneyland and next to the fireplace at Christmas.Two smiling faces in each picture: January and Hillary.When I look closer, though, I can see that each picture has been carefully cut.An arm or a leg or some fingers belonging to a missing third person are in almost every shot.That’s the shooter, I realize with horror.It’s been less than a month since his death, and he’s already been excised from the Morrison household.I feel sad thinking about Mrs.Morrison bent over those photos with a razor blade, removing evidence of the shooter—her son—from her life.It’s the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.There are no chairs in the space under the stairs, and even if there were, we couldn’t sit on them, because the closet is basically a crawl space with about five feet of clearance at the far end