“Except?” I prodded.
“Except recently I stopped sending money,” he said. “Or rather I stopped selling. I think that’s why he came after you—to get me to start again.”
“I don’t understand. Why would coming after me make you start again?”
“Because I think he thought you’d ask me for the prescription. And he must have known why I stopped, though I can’t imagine how.”
“Well, why did you stop?”
He looked away for a minute, trying to decide what to say. I remembered reading about microexpressions and ways to tell people were lying, but I couldn’t remember which direction they’d look in when they weren’t telling the truth. Finally, he turned back to me. “I stopped selling because of you.”
“What?”
He started picking at his nails again. “I know Alex always jokes about how I’m this big flirt, and she doesn’t take me seriously. I asked her about you right after we met, whether you could ever be into me. She told me drug dealers weren’t your type.”
That was horrifying. I’d said that to Alex in confidence; I’d never meant for him to find out. I’d thought she was someone I could trust; I’d thought we were really starting to become friends, even if it would never be the same kind of friendship I’d had with Becca. “We were joking around,” I said.
“Oh, I know. She thought she was teasing me. But it hit me really hard—I liked you as soon as I met you, and you weren’t going to take me seriously if I kept doing what I was doing. So I stopped selling.”
“Because of me.” I had trouble believing that too, though I was pretty close to convinced that he was telling the truth about the other stuff now.
“Because of you. Or the idea of you. You’re smart and independent and lovely and you don’t seem caught up in any of the stupid things other kids at this school are into. I liked being able to help you with your SAT problem; you seem like someone who doesn’t ask for help all that often, and I liked how it felt to be useful to someone in that way. And maybe I’m not the guy for you, and maybe we’ll just be friends, but I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the possibilities. I don’t want to be that guy, the one someone like you couldn’t be with because of all this sordidness.”
I didn’t know what to say. I’d believed Alex when she said he was a big flirt, and even when there had been signs that maybe he really was into me, I’d brushed them aside. I hadn’t thought about how that might have made him feel. “I never meant to make you feel bad,” I said. I was tempted to reach out and touch his hand, but that didn’t seem like a good idea. Somewhere in the back of my mind was a flutter of excitement that he really did like me, a flutter that threatened to turn into a whole flock of butterflies if I thought about the implications of what he was saying. He’d been blackmailed into selling drugs; he wasn’t a dealer by choice. Which meant the only thing that had kept me from admitting how much I liked him was gone. But now wasn’t the time.
“I never thought you had,” he said. “But you see it now, don’t you? How me quitting handing out pills and sending money to some stranger set all this in motion?”
“So that’s what you meant in saying this was your fault.” I was relieved to hear it; I finally understood his logic, at least. But he was falling for the same thing Alex and I both had at first, thinking that we were the center of everything. She’d thought she was the only one being blackmailed until I told her what was happening to me; I’d immediately started suspecting old friends who had nothing to do with any of this because I felt guilty about lying to them. The more I learned, the more I was sure we were all wrong. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think it’s bigger than that. But I don’t know what to do about it. Maybe it’s time for us to come clean.”
“We can’t do that!” He sat up straight, like I’d just poked him with a Taser or something.
“God, whatever Blocked Sender’s got on you must be pretty bad,” I said.
“It’s not that. I just can’t put my parents through more than I already have.”
“It doesn’t sound like you put them through anything so far—you said you were trying to keep them from finding things out.”
“It’s not quite that simple,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not talk about it right now. I feel I’ve revealed enough for the moment, don’t you think?”