It wasn’t necessarily accurate to say that Junior had never cried before, but it was damn near close enough, especially by her measure. If she had known anything about babies, she would have said that as a baby she had cried, but she didn’t. To her memory, she had never cried before.

She didn’t see the point in it, for one. It was a whole lot of energy (and water) wasted on something that wouldn’t even get you what you wanted in the end, most of the time. And in order to cry, you really had to hurt, and Junior didn’t hurt. She hadn’t hurt for a long, long time. Or maybe she’d hurt so much when she was younger she’d used it all up and now didn’t have any more hurt to give. She didn’t hurt and she didn’t want, either because she just didn’t, or because she’d spent all her hurting and wanting with Claude, and it didn’t really matter to her because nothing really did.

So it was confusing and alarming when she felt the hot, unfamiliar pressure start building behind her eyes as she lay in the bed of Calvin’s truck. The water — salty, had it always been salty? — leaking from her eyes was just as alarming, and she did her level best to contain it. The lights of the survivor camp were gone by then, long vanished into the horizon and the darkness.

What a waste, she thought, crying over all that. Claude had done so much worse than that, and that was what brought the hurting back? A man like that? What a waste. I should have saved it, she thought, for someone important.

Maybe it wasn’t the hurting. The tears had only first sprung up when she remembered not what the man had done — what he had tried to do, and failed, because he was feeble and useless and got what was coming from. Nor had it come when she recalled the way his head seemed to almost burst out of itself from the impact of the shotgun in Calvin’s hands. They’d only come when she recalled the way he’d wiped the blood off her cheek, and then brought her close to him in the tightest embrace she’d ever known, nearly knocking the wind out of her.

Nobody had ever done that before. Or, at least, not that Junior could remember. She curled tighter in the truck bed.