“The truth. That I was never worthy of him to begin with. That it was my fault his life was taken too soon. That he was such a promising kid and I ruined it all. I took it all away from him.”

“That’s not true, Riley.”

“And after a while, everything stopped. The messages, the fake sympathy, all of it just stopped. And when I couldn’t find it in myself to go off to college and start a new life that was supposed to be ours, my mom stopped caring too. She just got mad and impatient and she didn’t understand that I wasn’t ready. That I was still grieving. I could see it in the way she looked at me… she didn’t understand why I was still stuck there—in my hell—when the world was moving around me. I started to lock myself in my room. I didn’t eat. Didn’t shower. Didn’t talk to anyone. And then one night she came into my room and said, ‘It’s time to move on,’ like it was that fucking easy. And I lost it, Dylan.” I break off on another sob. “It’s not like I planned on any of it. I hadn’t even started drinking then. I stole her car in the middle of the night. I just wanted to hurt her like her words had hurt me. And when her salon came into view, I stepped on the pedal and I drove up the curb and over the sidewalk and right through the front window. Just to fuck her, you know?”

“Riley…”

“But I didn’t stop, I couldn’t. I just kept driving, hitting wall after wall until there was nowhere else left to go and the car wouldn’t move and I just sat there with smoke around me and my mind gone and my heart dead in the bottom of the lake.”

Dylan clears his throat. “And then what happened?”

“Cops came. Fire trucks. Ambulances. Apparently I’d gone through five different businesses in my fit of rage. Jake’s dad’s law practice was one of them. That’s how he knows about it. I got arrested and charged with so many felonies, I can’t even name them. Mom hired a lawyer to try to get me out of it using temporary insanity as a defense, but it’s a small town. I ruined people’s businesses, their incomes, their livelihoods. It didn’t matter that I was still hurting. I caused more suffering than Jeremy’s death had caused me. It was like a witch-hunt, pitchforks and everything. They probably would’ve burned me at the stakes if they could. But not Jake’s dad. For some reason he felt for me and he helped my mom get rid of her hired lawyer and he offered her a deal. Pay off what the insurance doesn’t cover for the damage caused and six months of home-arrest. Ankle bracelet and everything. My mom took it. I was too fucked up to care. Mom lost all her clients. Then she had to sell the salon to pay everyone and I started to drink. After a while, I couldn’t stop drinking. And Mom didn’t stop supplying it. It was easier for her to deal with me in a sedated state of constant semi drunk than deal with watching my emotional pain.”

Dylan takes a huge breath, his chest heaving and pushing against my side. “Riley. What happened to you, the way people treated you… that’s their shame to carry. Not yours,” he says, repeating my words.

I face him, watching him blink back his own tears. “It took me a long time to work that out. A really long time. And when I did, I just got more pissed because they weren’t fucking there, Dylan. No one was. They weren’t there when I was sinking, drowning, trying to search for Jeremy. They weren’t there when I finally found his body, eyes open, laying cold and still under the water. They weren’t the ones who tasted the blood in their mouths… or woke up for weeks after… dreaming of that same blood-stained water drowning them and killing them. They didn’t feel the burn in their lungs when they screamed for help, their mouths and lungs filling and dying for air. I swam to the shore and screamed and screamed and nobody came. Nobody heard me. Nobody saved him. I was the one who dived back in, who kicked and kicked and used every single bit of strength I had to get him out. His eyes were still open, Dylan. His beautiful lifeless eyes were still there, but they were dead. And so was he. His head was on my lap, his blood on my hands, and I knew he was dead. I just cried and held him. I didn’t know what else to do. People came, people shouted, people cried. And the next thing I knew, I was being pulled away from him—the boy I love. They were taking him away from me. And the first thing they did was close his eyes.” I choke hard on the sob and finally release it, my breaths as weak as the rest of my body. “Those eyes were mine. They belong to me and they took them away from me.”

He kisses away my tears, his body warm against mine.

We breathe through the pain, apart but together, and we hold each other. We hold on to the only thing that makes sense in an otherwise messed-up world and we allow ourselves to hurt and to grieve and to love and to forgive. We watch the sun move across the sky, feel the wind envelop us. And we keep close the chaos we created and the truth that releases it.

We bleed our hearts, bare our souls, and in the end, we hold on to a once untouchable reality.

He pulls away, his hands cupping my face and his eyes searching mine. Then he smiles—a childish innocent smile his mother gets to witness. And somehow, some way, he finds a way to release my hurt. “That’s it? That’s all of it?” he asks.

“That’s it,” I tell him.

He kisses my lips. Just once. “You’re just a little broken, Riley Hudson. That’s all. Now you just have to let me be the glue that keeps you together.”

Twenty-Two

Riley

We drive home in the complete opposite setting to the drive there. I sit in the middle of the seat, his hand on my leg, the afternoon sun beating down on us while he tells me about the engine that’s been sitting in his garage since he was sixteen. Occasionally, he’ll ask if I’m sure I want to hear about it. I tell him he’s stupid and to keep going. Of course I want to hear about it. I write down what type it is so I can google it later and prove it to him. Then I tell him about seeing him the first time when I was twelve and he was in his driveway and how I went home and thought about kissing him. He eyes me sideways, a clear smirk on his lips, then he calls me a juvenile horn-bag and pushes me away. A second later, though, he pulls me back and apologizes. Then he adds that had he known I felt that way, he probably would have walked around shirtless a lot more. I remind him I was twelve. He reminds me of his bacon joke and uses it to prove that in his mind, he’s still twelve.