before answering. “You okay?”
I grimace. “Yes. I’m fine.” I cross my arms over my chest and grumble, “Why are we still sitting here? Are we going to hang out in front of my house all night?”
He taps his fingers against his steering wheel, drumming out a beat. “No. Of course not…” He hesitates before continuing, “You zoned out there for a minute. I was trying to tell you something, but it was like you didn’t even hear me.”
I roll my eyes. “I’m fine. Jesus Christ. Can we please just go?” What does this guy want from me? I gave him the wrong impression at the bookstore last night. I’m not into sharing my deep, dark thoughts with friends I’ve known for years, never mind boys I’ve known for, like, a minute. I mean, calm down, guy. Just because you saved me from some panic attacks—which, fine, was a decent thing to do—doesn’t mean I owe you anything. I don’t owe you a window into my damaged psyche. This isn’t some fairy tale where you’re going to swoop in and save me. I’m way too far gone for that shit, and I’m not ten years old. I know those stories are a bunch of crap.
I glance over at him, and he has the expression of a boy who just saw someone kick his kitten. All the fight drains out of me. I slump down in my seat and sigh. “Sorry.” I push my hand through my hair. “I’m not good at this.”
“At what?”
“Like, generally speaking, talking to people.”
“Yeah, well. Me either. Like I said last night, I’m out of practice.”
I give a little laugh. “You think you’re out of practice? Last year I basically spoke to five people, total.”
He glances at me as he puts the car into drive. “Yeah…Why weren’t you in school until this semester?” He winces. “Is that a dumb question? Obviously it makes sense you wouldn’t want to go back….”
I sigh. “Look, the reason I wasn’t in school is pretty much common knowledge. You could ask almost anyone from my old school and they’d be able to tell you.”
He raises his eyebrows, questioning.
I sigh. “Okay, well, after the stuff that happened last year, I was really angry….”
“You had every right—”
I hold up my hand, stopping him. “Let me finish, okay?”
Zach nods. He turns the car onto a side street. The road is dark and nearly deserted.
I look out my window, away from him, into the night. “Like I said. After everything last year, I was angry.” I close my eyes for a moment, try to remember to breathe.
“And when they reopened school, everyone wanted to be my friend all of a sudden—people who’d never talked to me before would come up to me in the halls all May, are you okay, how are you doing, blah blah blah—like they wanted to feed off what happened to me, make it more their own. It was disgusting. I started getting into fights. Like, a lot of fights. Principal Rose-Brady gave me a ton of chances, because…well, you know. Everyone felt sorry for me.
“So yeah. I was skipping class all the time. Fighting a lot. It’s not like I was just randomly kicking people’s asses, though, you know. I was trying to help people. To stand up for people who needed someone on their side. That’s what no one seems to understand. I was trying to defend people who needed help, even if they didn’t think they did. I owed the world that much. But Rose-Brady didn’t see it that way. All she saw was me punching this asshole in the face after he tried to join the shitty grief group they set up at school….She wouldn’t even listen to why I did it. How messed up is that?” My hands are shaking in my lap.
It’s like I’m back there that day, sitting in that stupid group they basically forced me to go to, determined to mind my own business for once, to keep my head down. The second letter from the jail had arrived in my mailbox the night before,