boardwalk at Santa Cruz. I hold it up and gaze into its glass-marble eyes.
Afton takes a step closer. “You don’t have to—”
I toss the horse into the fire. It smokes and smokes, horrible black puffs that smell awful, like when something plastic ends up on the heating coil of the dishwasher. Then the wind shifts and blows the smoke directly at us.
“We’re probably inhaling toxic chemicals right now,” Afton says, but I don’t move out of the path of the smoke. The horse finally catches fire and burns, its ears blackening, first one and then the other. Then the entire thing kind of melts into a sludge.
I cough. I’m being melodramatic. I know that. But I can’t shake the urge to destroy everything in my life that has ever touched Leo. Those things are tainted now. They need to be cleansed.
“Did the horse have a name?” Afton asks somberly.
“Bucky.”
“Farewell, Bucky the horse,” Afton says.
The screen door bangs. It’s Abby holding a bag of marshmallows. “Can we have s’mores?”
“Why not?” I say.
We put more wood on the fire until it’s burning cleanly again. Then we find chocolate and graham crackers and settle around the firepit, roasting marshmallows on the metal poles we use for camping. Abby soon gets bored and goes back inside. Afton and I stay and watch the fire go through its stages, first hot and fierce and a little bit out of control, then steady and warm, then glowing embers. I scooch my chair close to the fire like I’m cold, even though it’s 75 degrees outside. I wrap my arms around myself and stare into the flickering glow.
“Are you going to live?” Afton asks after a while. This is something Mom used to say when we were little and fell off our bikes or skinned our knees.
I scoff. “I’m not going to die over a boy, thank you very much.”
“That’s quite sensible of you.”
I stir through the coals with a fire poker. “This whole time he was hooking up with other girls.” It feels like a joke, like a bad plot twist in a movie, so predictable, so clichéd, that it couldn’t be true.
“He’s an asshole,” Afton says.
“Yes, yes, he is,” I agree wholeheartedly.
“So really it’s a good thing.”
I turn to look at my sister. “What? What’s good about it?”
“That you didn’t sleep with him. You deserve for your first time to be better than my first time. It should be special.”
She’s right, and I know it, but this also feels like an I-told-you-so.
“It was special,” I snap. “I thought he loved me.”
Afton arches an eyebrow at me. “Yeah, and yesterday you were freaked out about that because you didn’t feel the same. But today you’re pissed because he clearly didn’t love you. The point is, it wasn’t right between you.”
My face burns. Leo doesn’t love me. He never did. Sure, it’s true that I don’t love him, either, but that doesn’t seem like an important distinction at the moment. I think about the way he told Kayla how we met. That’s all I was to him. One of his mom’s art groupies. A walking compliment. A fangirl.
Afton reads my expression and backpedals. “I get that it hurts, though. It’s the principle of the thing, or whatever. I know.”
“How would you know?” Afton’s never been dumped. She’s never been cheated on. Her boyfriend clearly adores her and doesn’t have a difficult time with the definition of the word boyfriend. This kind of thing would never happen to Afton.
“I know because . . .” She stops herself, because she sees I’m right. “Trust me, it would have been a mistake, sleeping with Leo. You would have regretted it. So you should be glad.”
“I’m a lot of things right now, but glad isn’t one of them.” What I am is tired of Afton telling me how to feel. Some part of my brain understands that my sister is only trying to help, but another part wants to punch her in her perfect upturned nose. Especially since Leo isn’t here to get his nose punched. “You can’t ask me to be happy about this, okay?”
“I get that,” she says. “But in my experience—”
I hold up a hand. “This isn’t your experience. It’s my experience.”
“Okay, but I—”
“I’m not you, Afton!” I burst out before she can get fully into the big-sister lecture on changing my perspective. “I’m not . . .”
Perfect is the word I don’t say, the word that sticks in my mouth, because I know Afton won’t like that.