“I’m sorry,” Tessa replied gently. “As hard as things were with my own mother, especially when she was in one of her down cycles, I never felt as unhappy or uncomfortable as I did at Michelle’s house. And, well, when Brittany and Sean moved in, things went from bad to really, really bad overnight.”

Peter grimaced. “Michelle called that one exactly right about her sister being crazy jealous of you. I’m guessing the minute Brittany laid eyes on you she felt threatened. I mean, I can’t imagine any woman being particularly happy about her boyfriend living in the same house with someone who looks like you. A supermodel would feel insecure next to you.”

Tessa’s cheeks flushed in mingled embarrassment and pleasure at Peter’s rather awkwardly phrased compliment. “Um, thanks for the vote of confidence. Anyway, that’s pretty much all of it. I’ve been saving every penny I can, and I think by the end of next month I’ll have enough to rent a room somewhere. I’ve been checking online ads, and it looks like there’ll be plenty of vacancies in June when people start graduating from college or moving into other residences.”

Peter frowned. “That might not be as easy as you think, Tessa. I learned from experience that you typically have to be eighteen before you can sign a lease. I was all set to move out of my mother’s house a year ago, had a place lined up, but when it came time to sign the papers the landlord insisted on seeing I.D., and refused to rent to me without an adult’s signature.”

“Oh.” She couldn’t hide the dismay in her voice. “I hadn’t thought about that. I figured that as long as I had the money and a way to pay my share of the rent nobody would care. Do you think all landlords are like that?”

“Probably. We do live in a college town, after all, and a lot of the students at U of A rent apartments and shared houses. Landlords are likely to be pretty diligent about who they rent to, especially if they don’t want to run the risk of having their property trashed.”

Tessa tried valiantly to stem the sense of despair that threatened to overwhelm her at what she’d just learned. “Guess that means thirteen more months in my car, then,” she replied, giving a careless little shrug as though such a development was no big deal.

Peter frowned. “Do you really think you can keep this up for another year? Isn’t your case worker or social worker – whatever her official title is – going to find out the truth eventually? I mean, I get that Michelle’s mom isn’t going to rat you out since she wants to keep getting the money, but what happens when your case worker decides it’s time to pay a visit and check up on you?”

Tessa bit her bottom lip worriedly. “I think about that a lot. And I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that my social worker is pretty overwhelmed with her case load. She told me that when I first met her in October. And she was incredibly relieved that I’d managed to find a place to stay since the agency apparently has a huge wait list for teens needing foster homes. She would have had to place me in this group home over on Grant Road – the same home that just got shut down last month.”

“I read about that,” recalled Peter. “I don’t remember all the details at the moment, but it sounded pretty bad, lots of abuse and neglect, regular kids being thrown in with ones that were mentally ill or just out of juvie. And they were going to put you in a place like that?”

She nodded. “So you can understand why I’d rather live in my car. At least I feel safe there. Relatively so, I mean.”

Peter motioned to their waitress for the check, and refused Tessa’s offer to split the bill with him. “Where do you, uh, hang out at night? Park your car, I mean.”

“I move around a lot,” she admitted. “Never the same block or even the same neighborhood two nights in a row. That way none of the neighbors or police get suspicious seeing a strange car night after night. And I always make sure it’s a good area, nice homes and all that. And I try to leave as early as possible in the morning before people start heading out to work and school so that no one notices me.”

He gave her a sympathetic look. “You can’t keep doing that forever, Tessa. One of these times a cop will spot you, or someone might even try breaking into your car while you’re still inside. And I get the part about not wanting to stay in a shitty group home. I’d rather live in my car or even on the streets before I’d willingly trust the system to look out for me. Don’t you have any relatives somewhere you could live with? What about your father?”

Tessa looked down at her lap where she was nervously clasping and unclasping her hands. “I don’t know anything about him,” she admitted. “My mom – I told you about her bipolar disorder, right?” At Peter’s nod, she continued hesitantly. “Well, one of the many symptoms when a manic-depressive is in a manic phase is, well – they, uh, have a lot of – um, sex. One of the articles I read called it hyper-sexuality. She apparently experienced one of these episodes around the time I was conceived, and never had any idea who my father was. From the little information I was able to pry out of her, it could have literally been one of a couple of dozen different men, none of whom she bothered to learn anything about.”

“Holy shit.” Peter stared at her in disbelief. “That’s – wow. I was about to say crazy, but then I realized that your mom really was – uh -”

“Crazy,” finished Tessa, nodding. “Not crazy, exactly, but mentally imbalanced. Except for the very short periods of times when she would actually take the medications they prescribed for her. But those times never lasted for very long. My mother hated being medicated, always claimed the drugs made her feel worse, that she wasn’t herself when she was taking them. She loved being in a manic state, was convinced that’s when she was at her most creative, and she’d literally go without sleep for a couple of days or more at a time and fill up an entire notebook with her writing.”

“What sort of a writer?” inquired Peter. “Writing is my big passion, you know. Eventually I want to be a journalist, work for one of those big news agencies, and travel around the world covering stories. Probably never going to happen, but it’s been my dream since I was in middle school.”

“Never say never,” she corrected him. “If you want it badly enough, I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it happen. As for my mother, she wrote fiction. She actually had three or four books published when I was still a little girl, and we lived off the royalties for a few years. And then her illness started getting the better of her, and the stuff she wrote was just a bunch of gibberish – nothing that made the least bit of sense.”