Gavin’s fingers combed through my hair as I sucked in a shuddered breath, my face pressing to the tear-dampened front of his shirt. My brother Drew was gone, and I’d never felt so abandoned.
“He’ll visit, Avery Dean.”
Maybe we both had to tell ourselves such lies to cope with the finality of his goodbye. Gavin had been Drew’s best friend, and I knew he was as sad as I was, but guys hid their emotions better than girls.
There was an old nursery rhyme that said boys were made of frogs, snails, and puppy-dog tails but young men were made of sighs, leers, and crocodile tears. Where were his tears now? I needed to see his emotions to believe they were real.
I sniffled, trying to get ahold of myself. I was being a baby. “Why don’t guys cry?”
“We do. In private.”
“What happens when the pain is too much and there are people around?” Didn’t they ever just … break?
“We figure out a way to swallow back the pain and save it for later.”
That old rhyme also claimed little girls were made of sugar, spice, and everything nice, but I was more along the lines of an unsweetened tea that attracted flies. And I’d never fit the bill of a young lady made of ribbons, lace, and a sweet, pretty face. Puberty had really botched that deal for me.
Pretty people got pretty things. I was awkward, poor, and a victim of my upbringing in the worst possible way. If I could just look like the pretty girls, the ones on the cheer squad who caught the attention of all the boys, maybe I could get somewhere better than this.
As it stood, I was finding very little to look forward to. “Do you think I’ll ever be pretty?”
Gavin leaned back and studied my face. “You’re pretty now, Avery Dean.”
“No, I’m not. I’m chubby, and my clothes are ugly and I can’t even French braid my own hair.”
He laughed. “What the hell does any of that have to do with being pretty?”
“Everything.”
“Avery, you are pretty. You have beautiful eyes, a smile that lights up a room when you laugh, and…”
Hanging on every word as if it were a lifeline leading to a better place, I blinked up at him. “And what?”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen and a half.”
“Well, you’re built like a twenty-year-old. You’re not chubby. You’re curvaceous. Trust me. You’re pretty.”
No one ever called me more than all right.
I was suddenly very aware of how I was sitting on his lap, the way his face wore a shadow of hair along his jaw, and the intense way his eyes stared into mine. “Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Gavin?”
“I don’t want one. Not yet.”
“How come?”
“Because I’m leaving in a few years and I don’t need anything or anyone making me want to stay.”
“You’re leaving?” I pulled back, furious he would announce this only an hour after I watched my brother drive away.
“I can’t stay here, Avery Dean. I’m better than this place. So are you. I’ll work for a little longer, but then I’m enlisting. I want to see the world. There’s so much more to it than Blackwater. I want to live in a city and experience other cultures. There’s no culture here, just poverty, pollution, and cynicism. This place is a cancer.”
I’d never heard it put that way, but he was right. Something happened to a person when they spent more than a decade here. Their standards dropped to irretrievable depths and a sort of hardness formed around them like a callous.
“I don’t want to stay here either.”
“You won’t. You’ll go to college and—”
“College is for rich people.”
“College is for smart people. All you need to do is figure out a way to escape, and then you’ll figure out a way to survive.”
I never knew he thought so highly of me. No one else did. I began calculating his age. Drew was nineteen. Gavin had to be around the same. He didn’t graduate because he got his GED and had a job when everyone else was still in school. Maybe he was nineteen. My gaze roamed his face, marking all the signs of maturity.
“Avery…”
Realizing I was staring, I blinked and looked away. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. You can look at me.”
My lashes lifted and there was something different in his eyes, a sort of exposed secret that wasn’t there a minute ago. I didn’t have guy friends and I pretty much kept to myself at school when other girls were around. Gavin wasn’t necessarily my