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So I sat beside my best friend, useless and angry and frustrated about both those things, while he tried not to shake. After a few minutes, his head tipped sideways and landed against my shoulder.

I went still.

“You can move,” he mumbled.

“I know.”

“You’re acting like I’m radioactive, DeeDee. And you’re sweaty,” he rambled on. “You know, your mom buys you deodorant for a reason.”

I stared straight ahead. Afraid if I said the wrong thing, my best friend would disappear again and the scared little boy would come out. Alvin spent years proving he wasn’t that boy anymore and I spent years pretending like I didn’t know he was still inside there somewhere. Crying on the hard days. Days like today. And then hiding away until his old man did something fucked up again.

“I can leave, ya know? If you want to be alone?”

Alvin made a small sound that could have been a laugh. Then his fingers curled into my shirt. “Don’t go,” he whispered.

I’d stayed that time. Because that was all I’d known how to give him. My shoulder. My silence. The promise that I wasn’t going anywhere.

I’d thought that was enough.

The memory ended with me catching Trevor flinching out of the corner of my eye when someone outside the infirmary laughed.

Mason felt it too. His arm tightened around Trevor, and Trevor folded farther into himself, shoulders rounding as if he could make his body vanish beneath Alvin’s sweatshirt and the weight of everyone’s attention.

I looked at him and I saw Alvin. Not the Alvin who could fill an entire room with noise. Not the Alvin who made jokes when he was scared and insults when he was hurting.

The other one. The boy behind the shed, waiting for someone to stay. Begging them to stay. Begging me to stay.

I turned towards the door.

“Mr. D’Angelo,” Mason called out to me.

I stopped.

The kid was watching me over his friend’s head. His eyes were red and his face was blotchy, but his voice was eerily calm. Like he was judging whatever I was gonna say next. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Find them.”

“And then what?”

I looked back at Trevor and shook my head. “I don’t know yet.”

Mason’s mouth twisted up but I wasn’t about to lie to the kid to make him feel better. That was what I’d always done. Lie to make everyone comfortable, including myself. And all that seemed to do was make things worse.

I walked away before I chickened out and made a bunch of promises I was never gonna be able to follow through on.

The campground was a buzz of activity by the time I walked outside. Cindy crossed between two of the cabins carrying her clipboard in one hand and a coffee in the other. Campers shouted to each other from the dining hall. One of the kids had turned music on near the recreation field, some obnoxious pop song with too much bass.

Everything looked… normal. The sun was bright. The lake glittered. A group of kids fought over a volleyball near the dock. Somewhere among them were the boys who were responsible for making Trevor look like he looked back there…

I found a few stragglers from my group behind the chow hall. There were four of them. The two I’d spotted hanging out near the dock through the window stood with their backs against the wall, still wearing their hoodies despite the heat. The others were sitting on overturned crates, passing around a bag of chips.

They saw me approach. One of the boys smiled. “Mr. D.”

Fuck… what was his name? Billy? Bobby? Or had I just made that up in my head?

I stopped a few feet away. “Where were you this morning?”

The smile dropped from his face almost immediately. “What?”