"Okay," Carol said. "I used to be a cheerleader in high school."

"Lie," Daryl said instantly, because he couldn't imagine it.

"You have to wait until I've said all three. Then you can make your guess."

"Fine. But I already know that's a lie."

Of course, Carol was cheerful, at least she was these days. And she was pretty. But she wasn't the kind of pretty that the cheerleaders in his high school were. He'd only gone to high school for one year, and he'd certainly never hung out with the cheerleaders, but he'd seen them. Thought about them. He couldn't see Carol in a cheerleader uniform, jumping up and down, spreading her legs out, her breasts jiggling all – and then, suddenly, he could see it. He did picture her exactly like that. And what he felt wasn't night moths trapped under a porch light. It was the blood rushing straight down. Thank God he had the poncho on, draping itself halfway down his body, so that if anything started twitching down there, she wouldn't notice.

He felt guilty for thinking of her that way. Usually, he felt no sense of shame when his mind wandered to sexual thoughts of various women, but for some reason, he felt guilty whenever he thought of Carol that way. And this wasn't precisely the first time he had.

"Okay, next one," she said. "I got straight A's in high school."

"That's likely true." Carol was smart as a whip. He hadn't guessed that about her in the beginning, but he and Rick had been teaching her to shoot and assemble and disassemble her gun and clean it, and she picked up everything so quickly. He never had to explain anything twice. It was like her mind was a vault and everything was alphabetized in there and she could pluck a memory out at any second.

"You have to wait!" she insisted. "Then you can guess. I haven't said my third one."

"Fine. What's yer third one?"

"I didn't have my first kiss until I was eighteen."

"That cain't be true," he said. Who the hell wouldn't want to kiss a sweet thing like her? Then again, maybe it was true. Carol had an innocence about her, and she'd somehow ended up married to that abusive asshole. How could that have happened to a woman with a lot of experience with men, a woman who had been treated better? Not that Daryl had been given a good example of how to treat women when he was growing up. He'd seen his father hit his mother, but, unlike Carol, his mama hit back just as hard. Merle had told him there was no sense standing up for Mama when she'd stand up for herself. Try to "protect" her and you'd just get in the middle of fists flying and hair pulling and objects soaring. You'd go deaf from all the hollering. And, the truth was, sometimes Mama even started those fights. She'd smacked Daryl's pa upside the head with a frying pan once, when Will Dixon came home smelling of cheap perfume, missing his belt, and with a smudge of bright red lipstick all over his fly.

But half the neighbors did the same thing. Once, Daryl had seen the woman next door chasing her husband out of their cabin while throwing Precious Moments figurines at him and shouting her head off. Sometimes someone called the cops when the fights got too loud or went on too long, or when a shotgun went off, but mostly people just ignored them. And the cops never did anything but show up and settle it down and take statements. They might occasionally arrest someone, if the man or woman took a swing at one of the officers or was too strung out on drugs, but usually they left with an empty patrol car.

Daryl hadn't realized there was any other way for couples to handle arguments until he'd spent two months crashing at his Aunt Billie Jean's house one summer. He ran away from home one late June, after his freshman year of high school. She and her husband lived in a middle-class suburb outside of Athens. Daryl had nothing but an address, and he'd ridden his dirt bike all seventy miles there, dragging it into the woods at night and camping out. Merle was in the army at the time, his mama was four years dead, and his pa was in one of his raging drunk moods.

Will Dixon had cut Daryl with the fire poker. After letting it get hot in the fire, he'd attacked Daryl with it. The pointed edge had torn right through Daryl's thin, hand-me-down wife beater t-shirt and marked the flesh with a sharp line down his back. It wasn't the first time Will Dixon had done it, either, but it was the first time Daryl had been big enough to fight back. Daryl wasn't as tall as his father – he never would be - but at fourteen, he was just as strong, and he wasn't drunk, so he grabbed that poker right out of Will Dixon's hands and smacked him hard across the back of the knees with it. His pa crumpled straight to the floor, howling in pain.

Horrified by what he'd done, Daryl had dropped the poker, grabbed his backpack from his bedroom – it was always packed and ready to go, in case Pa was in a mood - and left before Will Dixon could pick himself up off the ground. Daryl was afraid that if he stayed, he'd kill the man.

He hadn't seen Aunt Billie Jean but once in the last seven years, at his mama's funeral. Mama had always spoken ill of her sister for moving to Athens, said she'd gotten "too big for her britches" with that "fancy city job" of hers (she was just a bank teller) and that "uppity, sissy husband" she'd married. But Daryl had remembered his aunt as a kind woman, and he didn't know where else to go. Any of his local aunts and uncles would have only let him stay for a day or two before marching him through the woods straight back home. He hoped Aunt Billie Jean would let him stay longer.

Instead, when he'd shown up on her doorstep, Aunt Billie Jean had immediately picked up the phone to call her brother-in-law. Fortunately, Will Dixon's phone was out of order. "He ain't paid the bill," Daryl told her. "They cut it off. Guess I gotta stay with y'all."

Well, Aunt Billie Jean was having none of that. She had her husband Duke put Daryl right in the car and drive him back home. Uncle Duke said they were going to have "a talk" with his father about why Daryl had felt the need to run away. When Daryl's uncle found the cabin vacant, he said they'd sit down and wait for Will Dixon to get back from work. Uncle Duke plopped down on the brown and gold cloth couch. A cloud of dust rose up, and Uncle Duke coughed and winced.

Daryl said, "He ain't at work. He ain't got no job no more."

"He on the dole?" Uncle Duke asked.

"Don't qualify for unemployment. Got fired. Gets food stamps, but he trades 'em for smokes and whiskey."

"Then how does he feed you?"

"Feed myself mostly." Daryl hunted and fished, and he ate at his cousins' houses or neighbors houses sometimes, whoever would offer him a sandwich or some jerky or a bag of pork rinds. And, during the school year, he'd gone to school early in the morning for the free hot school breakfast - he'd filled out the paperwork to qualify himself and signed his father's name, because Will Dixon would have popped a gasket if Daryl knew he let the school system know his father didn't feed him. Daryl attended his first four periods, where he spent most of his time daydreaming out the window or casting secretive, cautious glances at girls who would never give him the time, got his free hot lunch, and then, most days, skipped out on his after-lunch classes.

Uncle Duke stood slowly and paced his way around the cabin, looking at the giant tit-shaped ash tray full of cigarette butts, the empty whiskey bottles littering the furniture and carpet, the cockroaches scurrying through the tiny kitchen piled high with dirty dishes. He stood before Daryl and looked him up and down - the old, fraying clothes that had been worn by three older cousins before him, the dirt under the fingernails, the hair that hadn't been washed in a week. "You're coming back with me and staying with us until your daddy comes to get you."

Uncle Duke left a note with his address and phone number and drove Daryl silently back to Athens. Daryl stayed with them for the rest of that summer, and his father never checked in once on him. Daryl saw Uncle Duke and Aunt Billie Jean fight, but do it without yelling at the top of their lungs or throwing anything or anyone hitting anybody. Most of the time, they'd arrive at some kind of compromise, where neither got his or her way, but they were both content with the outcome. And when Daryl fought with one of them and went straight to yelling, which was the only thing he knew how to do, they'd both speak back to him in a low, calm voice, until he felt like a damn idiot raising his voice.

They were good people, and they fed him well, but they had too many damn rules. They wanted him to wear "clean" clothes and have a "curfew" and say "please" and "thank you" and not bring dead animals into the house or watch pornos on the VCR, and then, when the end of August rolled around, they started talking about enrolling him in the local school and making him repeat his freshman year because "whatever school Will had him in," Uncle Duke said, "they weren't teaching him shit." That was the last straw. No way in hell he was going to some suburban school, with stuck-up, well-dressed suburban kids, as a 15-year-old freshman.

Daryl went back home. It would only be two more years before Merle got out of the army. He could survive his pa that long, if only by avoiding him as much as possible, and then he and Merle could get a place somewhere. Merle had never hit him in his life, not once. He wasn't always around when Daryl wanted him to be, what with his two stints in juvie and now the army, and Merle could say some mean shit, but he'd never raised a hand to Daryl, not the way pa had. They could live together when Merle got out, someplace far away from their father, the Dixon brothers, taking on the world.

Daryl left his aunt and uncle a note. It said – Thanks for everything. Headed home. Don't come after me – Daryl.

He half expected Aunt Billie Jean and Uncle Duke to show up at the cabin and drag him back to Athens, make him go to that "good school". But they didn't. He was relieved they didn't chase him down, but he was also hurt. He knew he'd given them a hard time those two months. And he knew they didn't have any legal right to him or responsibility for him. They'd done their part, more than they had to, more than he'd asked for. But a small part of him had truly believed they would follow him home and drag him back. And then he'd come with them kicking and screaming, because hell if he was going to let someone tell him what to do, but they'd make him come.

Only…they didn't.

They mailed him care packages, once a month, but he never saw their faces again. When he ran away from home for good at sixteen, three months before Merle got out of the army, maybe the care packages kept coming, and maybe his pa didn't tell them Daryl was gone, because maybe Will Dixon wanted the cookies and jerky and peanuts and Gatorade, and maybe he thought he could use the pages from the books to wipe his ass.

"You all right?" Carol asked softly.

Daryl cleared his throat and shook off the memory. How had she known he was feeling down? How did she do that? "The cheerleadin' one," he said. "That's the one I'm goin' with. That's the lie."