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“Good,” he says.
I glance at the board. Then I see what he’s done, and before I can help myself, I say, “You came back to correct the equation?”
His cheeks flush. “Nah. I just thought there was another way of doing it, so I came back to try.” He makes a face. “Weird, right?”
I shrug. “I don’t think so, but I spend hours fussing with computer programs to see if I can do it in fewer lines of code.”
He grins, and maybe I should say my heart gives a little flutter, but it doesn’t. It’s my stomach that reacts, twisting in a sudden need to flee. He’s too smart, too cute, too tempting, and nothing good would come of that.
“That’s right,” he says. “Computers are your thing. My parents sent me to coding camp when I was a kid, hoping I’d find a sciencethat pays a little better than…” He motions to the board with a smile. “But I couldn’t wrap my brain around it.”
I could say something to keep the conversation going. Mention that math can make you money—my older brother is at university, applying his own math skills to finance and economics. But I just want to get out of there before this turns into an actual conversation and I start to think he’s interested in what I’m saying, and then I realize he’s just being nice or, worse, setting me up for mockery. I know who he hangs around with.
“I should go,” I say. “My friends are in the caf. Lunch.”
Yes, because clearly, if they are in the cafeteria during lunch break, I need to clarify why they’re there. So smooth.
I mumble something and flee.
What would have happened if I stayed? Knowing what I know now—that Anton was making conversation, that he wasn’t an asshole, that he’d noticed me.
What if I stayed, Anton?
If I’d stayed, would we have had twenty-two years together instead of three?
No, because what happened six months later would have ended it. I’d have been gone, my family whisking me to Toronto under a new name.
Any relationship Anton and I developed back then wouldn’t have survived what happened that spring. The séance. The aftermath. The trial.
Blood splashed through a forest clearing. The only sound the chirping of tree frogs.
“Janica.”
I jump out of my seat. I’ve been telling the story to Dr. Cirillo and the others, speaking on autopilot as I relive those memories. Now that name yanks me back, and it’s not the soft whisper I’d imagined at the séance with Leilani. It’s harsh, spat with a sneer.
“Nic?” Jin reaches to lay his hand on mine.
I blink hard and look around. Clearly no one here said my old name… or heard it.
Because it never happened. I imagined it because I’d been thinking of that old life, when I bore that name.
“Did something happen?” Dr. Cirillo asks.
I shake my head. “I was just… just thinking of how things might have been different if I’d stayed and talked to Anton. But we were sixteen, and my family moved again that spring—Dad got a job transfer to Toronto.”Because he requested it.“So maybe, if anything happened then, Anton wouldn’t have sought me out later. We’d have already had our shot.”
“He sounded sweet,” Shania says wistfully. “A cute, sweet math geek.” She sighs. “I need to find one of those.”
I smile at her. I could say something. Like that, if she wants to find someone, she needs to get out and look. Shania is a nurse who also works part-time as a personal support worker to pay off her student debt. That doesn’t leave much time for socializing, and her sister’s death seems to have made an already introverted young woman fold deeper into herself.
Shania may have found me through our grief therapy, but it’s become more than that. Friendship? Not in the traditional sense. I acutely feel our thirteen-year age difference.
Am I filling her big-sister void? Maybe, a little.
Am I okay with that?
I… I’m not sure. I’m fond of Shania, and she certainly isn’t thrusting me into that role. I balk at the idea because I have too much going on in my life to be anyone’s big sister. I’m very, very busy. With work and grieving, and more grieving.
It’s not that I don’t have time to be a big sister. It’s that I don’t have the bandwidth. And maybe I should find it, but I’m afraid of seeing Shania as a project to distract me from my grief.
