Maybe I deserve to be destroyed.
But I don’t share these thoughts with Mrs. Dover. Instead, I say, “I think they’re wrong. I mean, it would make more sense if he hated me for . . .” I swallow and glance up at her. She’s watching me patiently, listening. “But he doesn’t. He’s glad I’m back—he said so. And I don’t want to avoid him. I want to show him that I came back here to hold myself accountable for what I did. Even if it’s hard.”
Mrs. Dover nods in her calm, understanding way. “Have you talked to Ethan about this? Why you came back?”
I shake my head. Ethan and I have never discussed my year away. We also haven’t talked about Aubrey or Fulham Road and what it all means for our future as friends. It’s easier to talk about the band, or music, or our preferred toppings at Subway . . . topics that aren’t so loaded that simply mentioning them feels like ripping the pin out of a grenade.
“Well, maybe you should,” she says, like it’s a simple thing. And maybe it is.
“Yeah,” I agree, even though just thinking about that conversation makes my palms slick with sweat. “Maybe I should.”
After several days of searching for Ethan around school, I finally spot him on Tuesday afternoon, sitting outside alone on the concrete stairs leading to the gym’s outdoor exit. His hood is up, protecting his face from the brisk October wind, but I can tell it’s him by the way he’s sitting—feet apart, elbows resting on knees, head bent over his phone.
He doesn’t look up until I’m standing right in front of him. When he does, his pensive expression lifts, and he tugs out the earbuds I just now noticed are jammed into his ears. “Hey,” he says, flipping down his hood. His dark hair blows across his forehead. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Yeah.” I gesture vaguely behind me. “Are you waiting for someone or . . . ?”
“Oh. Yeah, I’m waiting for Hunter. He’s got basketball practice in the gym, but he’s probably going to be a while yet.” He slides over a few inches and nods to the space beside him. “Want to sit down?”
I sit and tuck my backpack next to my feet. “Hunter plays basketball?”
He wraps his earbuds wire around his phone and stuffs both into his pocket. “Not all musicians are stoners, you know. Some of us are also part jock.”
“I know.” I adjust my behind on the hard concrete. “But when you look at Hunter, you don’t think jock. He wears a leather jacket and smokes like a chimney.”
Ethan laughs. “Yeah, the smoking holds him back a little on the court. Sometimes he wheezes even worse than me.”
“How’s your asthma these days?”
“Not as bad as it was.”
I glance over at his angular profile and feel a pang of something close to protectiveness. It’s like Aubrey has somehow possessed me with her mother-hen qualities and is imploring me to inquire about her little brother’s welfare.
“So,” I say, going with it. “Lacey seems nice.”
He gives me an odd look, probably because he knows as well as I do that I’ve only spent two minutes in Lacey’s presence and therefore can’t really comment on her personality. “She’s okay,” he says.
Okay? He’s dating—not to mention kissing and who knows what else—a hot girl and she’s okay? “How long have you guys been together?”
He shrugs and peers straight ahead toward the back parking lot. “A couple of months, I guess. She goes to school with Kel and Corey and Julia. I met her through them. We’re not serious or anything.”
“Do you think—” I clamp my lips together, hesitating. Even though I sought him out today for this very reason—to talk about some of the hard stuff—the words aren’t going to come easy.
Maybe he senses what I want to ask, because he looks at me and says, “Do I think what? Just say it, Dara.”
I let out a breath. Beside us, I can hear the muffled thump-thump-thump of a basketball and several pairs of sneakers squeaking against the gym floor. I concentrate on that until my heart stops racing.
“Do you think Aubrey would’ve liked her?”
To my relief, Ethan laughs again.
“No,” he says firmly and without hesitation. “She’s kind of shallow, and she’s always late. For everything. She also cracks her knuckles.”
I shake my head, a giggle tickling the back of my throat. “Oh, God. She’d hate her.” Nothing annoyed Aubrey more than constant lateness, and nothing grossed her out more than knuckle-cracking. She would’ve loathed Lacey on the spot.
“To be fair, I think she would’ve hated pretty much anyone I dated,” he says, reaching down to scoop a pebble off the bottom stair. “She’d probably think no one was good enough for me, just like I thought no one was good enough for her. Especially that douchebag Justin.”
My breath hitches in my chest, and I have to force myself not to reach out and touch his arm, stop him right there. Justin, like Fulham Road, is a piece of the past I’m not quite ready to confront. “I don’t want to talk about him right now.”
Ethan nods, looking mildly guilty. “Sorry. So, um, what was it like living with your aunt and going to private school?”
Even though he just provided me with an opening to the exact thing I want to discuss, my pulse speeds up again. “How did you know that’s where I was?”
“I asked around.” He bounces the pebble on his palm. “It wasn’t exactly classified information.”
I want to ask him why he’d inquired about me to begin with, but I push the question aside for now. “It was . . . different. I went because my parents thought I needed a change of scenery.”
“I get that.” He tosses the pebble toward the gravel path below the stairs. It lands a few feet away, blending in with all the others.
“I want to tell you why I came back,” I say, without lifting my gaze from the ground.
“Okay.”
I keep silent for a moment, my thoughts whirling as I work out how to start. Sometimes, when I try to explain my reasoning to Dr. Lemke or even to my parents, it seems like they don’t fully understand. But Ethan might. He’s the closest to the situation, and we’ve always had a bond. We get each other. Or at least we did when Aubrey was still here, linking us together.
I take another breath, block out the incessant thumping on the other side of the gym door, and let the words spill. “My first few months at Somerset Prep, I kept to myself. I was a loner. I didn’t want friends, so I went out of my way not to make any. I was still messed up, obviously, and it was like people could smell it on me. Everyone left me alone. I was the sad, quiet, new girl who never spoke to anyone or did anything. No one there knew about me, about what happened with Aubrey, and I didn’t want them to know. I liked being anonymous.”