Page 150

“The window. When did you decide to close it?” I laughed again, quieter this time. “Was it after that kiss? Was it because you fucking liked it?”

“It was closed a long time ago,” he said. And then, because apparently he wasn’t done killing me yet, he added, “You just never got the fucking hint. An open window isn’t always an invite, Alvin. Sometimes people just want some fucking fresh air.”

I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t. Because suddenly I wasn’t standing in the infirmary anymore. I was a kid again. Crossing the yard in the dark. Grass cold under my feet. Looking up at that window. Always open. Always waiting… but apparently I’d been the only one who thought it meant to come in.

CHAPTER 32

The campers spent those fucked-up hours after lunch learning to tie knots. They were terrible at it. Every rope they touched turned into either a tangled nightmare or a potential murder weapon. One kid managed to leash himself to a picnic table. Another one kept insisting the clove hitch was “basically a friendship bracelet for outdoors.”

He wasn’t wrong. Didn’t matter. I wasn’t here to validate their shit. I was here to pretend like we were all learning something important.

So I did. I laughed when the moment called for it. Corrected their grip. Untangled rope from their sweaty hands. Confiscated a stick some genius had sharpened into a spear. All while my brain screamed the same word over and over. No.

That’s what I’d told Alvin when he asked if the window was still open. No. Cruelest goddamn thing I’d ever done to him, and that was saying something coming from me.

By the time I got back to the counselor cabin, the sun had dropped low enough to turn everything that sick orange color. My shirt was glued to my back. Dirt under my fingernails. A headache hammering behind my left eye like something trying to claw its way out.

I pushed open the cabin door. And for a second, I didn’t know what I was looking at.

Alvin’s bunk was empty. The blanket gone. His pillow gone. The pile of clothes he’d treated like a permanent mattress vanished from the corner. No used socks balled up and tossed under the bed. No glitter high-tops lined up next to the trunk. No nail polish scattered across the table like he owned the place.

The only thing left was that cheap plastic spider habitat I’d picked up at some dead-end pet shop. And the creepy-ass eight-legged thing living in it. With a note taped to the front.

If you kill him, I kill you. Slowly.

I stood there with one hand still on the doorknob. The cabin looked huge without him in it. That was the first thing I thought. The second was that it looked like a tomb.

“Fuck,” I whispered. My voice sounded wrong in all that dead space.

I stepped inside. Stared at the bare bunk. There was a pale rectangle on the wall where one of his Post-It notes had lived all summer. The tape had taken paint with it when he ripped it down.

That was all he’d left. A mark. A scar on me like all the ones I’d left on him over the years.

I dropped my clipboard on my bunk. It hit the mattress and slid to the floor. I didn’t pick it up.

He’d packed up all his shit and moved out because of me. Because I’d crushed him badly enough that he could leave without having to say a word.

I sat on the edge of my bunk. The springs groaned while I tried to tell myself that this was better. Cleaner. Easier.

No more waking up with his feet shoving against my leg. No more listening to him bitch about my snoring while he stomped around the cabin floors. No more pretending I didn’t notice when he came back from the lake with his shirt stuck to his chest, the entire outline of his body daring me to touch it. No more sneaking around.

No more double-checking that we’d locked the infirmary door. Then checking it again twice more. No more lying.

I leaned forward. Elbows on my knees. The relief never came. Instead, I saw his face when I told him the window was closed. Like I’d reached inside him and ripped something vital out. Like he couldn’t breathe.

I’d seen that look before. When we were kids, he’d fallen off his bike and scraped his knee down to the bone. Didn’t cry until he saw me running across the yard. Then he fell apart, sobbing so hard he could barely breathe.

I’d carried him home. He’d wrapped his arms around my neck and trusted me. I’d spent the last few years teaching him not to trust me ever again.

The cabin door moved in the breeze. The hinge squeaked, and I looked over at it. Half-expecting him to be there with a smirk on his face that said, “I knew you’d miss me, asshole.”

I also knew that wasn’t happening this time around.

I looked at the empty bunk again. Remembered Alvin sitting there with his knees pulled up, talking nonstop while I tried to read. Stealing my blanket. Denying it while wrapped completely inside it. Calling me every name he could invent until I threatened to toss him out on his ass.

Then his bruised lips in the infirmary. How they tasted. The blood. The sweat. The tears. His hands twisted in my shirt. The way he’d looked at me after we kissed, so many questions running around in his head.

And I’d given him the answer. I’d told him it meant nothing.