“Well, I remember it,” he tells me.

“You do not.”

“Yeah-huh.”

“Sing it,” I say.

He starts humming something that sounds like a few different songs mashed together, and I start cracking up beside him, until I feel the back of his hand graze mine. We both fall silent, and after a second, he slides his fingers through mine. I’m so shocked I freeze.

“Why did you push me away, Nat?” he asks. “You were everything to me. I loved you so much.”

“It’s not that simple,” I say shakily. My heart is pounding as if I’m sprinting, and I’m just praying someone interrupts us fast, because I don’t want this to happen. I don’t want to keep putting him through this.

“I love you,” he says. “It’s so hard, Nat, not being able to talk to you about everything. I don’t even feel like myself lately. It’s so hard, and I love you.”

I love him too. I don’t think I could know a person as well as I know Matt and not love him. “Matt,” I plead.

“I could be better,” he says. “I could make you happy, if you told me what you needed.”

“Matt, you can’t make everyone happy. You can’t be everything everyone expects you to be, and you especially can’t be what I need and what everyone else needs, because what I need is to stop trying to make myself fit here and go somewhere new.”

“You’ll find someone else,” he says quietly, “at school. I know you will. But I won’t.”

“Of course you will, Matt.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Eventually you will.”

“No one will be you,” he says.

“We have to move on, Matt. It’s only going to get harder.”

“It doesn’t have to,” he says. His eyes are soft on me, much too close to my face. The next thing I know, he’s kissing me. Still, my brain is caught in a panicked frenzy in which part of me almost thinks it would be wrong or rude to stop him, while the rest of me knows I don’t want this. It must feel like kissing a dead fish to him, but he doesn’t seem deterred.

Finally I push lightly against his chest, but he either doesn’t feel it or ignores it, and now I’m freaking out. “Matt,” I say, but my voice is mostly lost in his mouth. I push harder, and this time I know he feels it, but he just keeps kissing me. I say it again—push again—and he pulls me closer, one hand skimming the hem of my shirt much too aggressively.

“Matt,” I snarl, but then he pins my hip down when I try to sit up. I shove him backward, hard, and he rolls away from me and sits up, blinking at me in the dark.

“I—” I don’t know what I’m going to say, but I don’t have time to figure it out before he half-falls off the truck and storms toward his house.

My whole body is shaking, my mind throbbing and reeling with waves of hurt and confusion.

Why did I do that?

I don’t know how long I sit there shaking, caught fast in a cycle of unanswerable questions, before I finally snap out of it and realize that I did nothing. And now I’m mad.

It’s only the second time I’ve ever been truly angry with Matt. All I want to do is go home, but there’s this voice in my head that says, no. You can’t let him get away with that. Because it wasn’t my fault, and he shouldn’t have kissed me, and most of all he shouldn’t have made me afraid. I shouldn’t have felt afraid in the arms of my first love.

The angry tears begin again as I scramble out of the truck and start toward the house. I vaguely hear Jack call after me, but I ignore him. There are people in Joyce’s cutesy-country-crafty kitchen, a few lounging on the soft floral couch in the living room, but Matt’s not with them. I head down the hallway toward his room, trying to keep myself from crying as I knock on his door.

He doesn’t answer, but he didn’t respect my space—why should I respect his? Matt Kincaid hurt me, and this night can’t get any worse.

So I throw open the door, and oh my God do things get worse.

My eyes land on Rachel as she shrieks in surprise and scrambles sideways off Matt, halfway off the bed. She bounces back onto her feet quickly, clutching her arms around herself self-consciously, but Matt’s still sprawled out on the comforter unconcerned, and I wish I had turned away as soon as my eyes registered them, but there was something so impossible about the situation that I’m completely frozen.

“Jesus, Natalie!” Rachel yelps, face flushed and eyes wide and white-rimmed. “Ever hear of knocking?”

The look on Matt’s face is the worst part. He looks pissed but sort of happy about it, like he couldn’t have planned this any better. I turn and run back down the hall, and this time, unlike all the rest, Matt doesn’t follow me.

I run through the living room and kitchen and burst back out into the lot, sobs breaking out of me like splintering wood.

I have to get out of here.

I spin, searching for Megan, someone to hold on to. But everything’s suddenly different, and I can’t get my bearings. The old red barn I’ve always known is gone, and in its place there’s a looming, powder blue and white storehouse that looks brand new. There are still people here, but the details are completely wrong. Derek’s in the cab of his truck making out with Molly Haines, a girl who’s loathed him since I misguidedly set them up in the ninth grade, and if that weren’t strange enough, he’s parked in a different spot. I run toward the mouth of the gravel driveway, but I can’t find Megan’s Civic anywhere. Everything’s wrong, in a nightmarish way where it’s not so wrong that I can be sure I’m sleeping. In fact, I’m sure I’m awake, but I’m also sure the world isn’t right, and the people and parked cars and music are closing in on me, and I can’t breathe. I’m no longer in control of my body, and I’m turning in search of help, then running, trying to put as much distance as possible between me and that sinister blue storehouse.

I take off down the slope of the gravel path, and at the bottom of the hill, I make my way toward the little bridge in the woods that connects the Kincaid farm with the church. Please let this stop right now. Please let this whole night be undone. Please get me to a place where everything’s how it’s always been and the world is stable, and I’m safe.