I shot an answer back immediately, informing her that I didn’t need to know the reasons she’d skipped class, and suggesting when and where we could meet.

Things my answer shouldn’t have done, but did: (1) It made me sound like an ass**le. An insensitive, superior ass**le. (2) Who didn’t care that her heart had been broken by an actual ass**le. (3) It was signed LM. (4) It made me sound like an ass**le.

I shut my laptop and paced around the apartment, earning a dirty look from my cat, who’d probably never had girl problems – because he accepted that he was a self-governing ass**le who refused to become emotionally attached. I’d aspired to that since I was sixteen, and thought I was something of an expert.

Pulling to a halt, I realized I’d slid halfway down the rabbit hole before I knew I was falling. I didn’t just want this girl. I cared about her. I’d wanted to destroy that guy Saturday night – I wanted to hit him until he’d never get up, and if she hadn’t made a noise in the truck, I might have done just that.

Fucking hell.

I sat back down and reopened the laptop. Minutes later, my inbox alert chimed.

I’d pissed her off. That much was clear. She told me she tutored at the middle school, but didn’t say what she tutored. Then she wrote: I’m sure I can catch up on the regular coursework on my own. She signed off as Jacqueline, not Jackie.

Throwing on shorts and a T-shirt, I assessed and reassessed every nuance of her message, looking for an opening – a place to change course. My thoughts in a jumble, I laced up my running shoes and jogged down the steps. I would pound the pavement under my feet until I either eliminated her from my mind or came up with a solution.

I couldn’t tell her through email that I was the guy from Saturday night. She was afraid of that guy, but she needed me to pass econ. She’d know as soon as we met up, of course. My only hope was to convince her, as the class tutor, that she could trust me.

Switching to Jacqueline instead of Ms Wallace, I suggested a meeting time and added a postscript: What do you tutor?

Her next email kicked my ass, because it opened with Landon. She must have got that from Heller. No one else on campus called me by the name I’d discarded when I left home at eighteen. Shit.

I concentrated on the rest of her message, where I learned she played the upright bass. The thought of her magical fingers coaxing music from an instrument that was roughly my height made my body tighten.

I needed another run and a much colder shower than the one I’d just taken.

After discovering that our schedules wouldn’t coordinate easily, and in the interest of not scaring her away completely – at least, that’s what I told myself – I offered to send her the information through email and conduct our tutoring sessions online for the time being.

I didn’t tell her I went by Lucas, not Landon. I didn’t tell her I’d been watching her, guardedly, for over two months. I didn’t tell her that I was the guy who’d witnessed the attack she’d just as soon forget, and also the one who’d stopped it. I didn’t tell her I was the guy whose touch made her flinch – even across a Starbucks counter, two days later.

We conversed via email over the next couple of days. I sent her the packet from Heller, clarifying a few things where he’d used a bit much econ jargon for a first-semester student. We joked about college bartering systems where beer is the currency for helping friends move. I began to look forward to her name in my inbox: JWallace – and then Wednesday morning came, and reality crashed down around me, firmly, and right on target.

9

Landon

I would be alone when Melody came over, because Dad and Grandpa had an appointment in town to see Grandpa’s accountant, who Dad referred to as a swindler and a con man. When he wasn’t calling him something way more insulting.

‘I’ve been seein’ Bob since you were in diapers!’ Grandpa growled this morning.

‘Then he’s had several decades to skim his share of your profits,’ Dad shot back. ‘It’s time to cut him off.’

‘I’ll do no such! Maybe if you’da stuck around, you’d know that most people aren’t criminals like the type you meet in Washington.’ As far as Grandpa was concerned, Washington was a ‘teeming cesspool of shady dealins’, and the fact that his son had chosen to live and work there had tainted him. I didn’t stay to hear Dad’s answer. I was pretty sure I’d already witnessed this argument. Multiple times.

I grabbed a protein bar after slugging some OJ from the carton while they were too busy one-upping each other to notice and headed out for school. Watching for Wynn or his thug friends as I got closer, I almost slowed to a stop as I crossed in front of the elementary school. A little kid was hopping out of his mom’s pick-up, but he misjudged the kerb and tripped forward, flat on to his face. His head bounced off the pavement as his mother screamed his name. I jogged straight over and went to one knee, lifting him while he sucked in air for the coming shitfit he was about to let loose. His nose was gushing blood and the tip of it was scuffed raw, but he looked pretty intact, considering. No forehead gash. No teeth on the ground.

‘Ohmygod, Tyler, ohmygod!’ his mother said, rushing up and yanking tissues from her purse, eyes wide. She slammed a tissue against his nose, which released the delayed wail I’d been bracing for. The kid’s lungs were certainly working okay.

‘So much blood! Oh, God – I should have pulled closer!’ she said, shaking and crying, tears streaming down her face.

‘Uh, I think his nose might be broken – you might not wanna press so hard on the bridge.’

She snatched the wad of tissues away, her hands trembling. ‘B-but the blood –’

I grabbed a couple of the tissues from her and pressed them under the kid’s nose. ‘Hold that right there, dude.’ He stared at me, but obeyed, sobs subsiding slowly. ‘You’re gonna be fine. I broke my nose a few years ago, playing hockey. That rink was a bloody mess and I nearly gave my mom a heart attack, but I was fine. No big deal.’

The kid reached for his mother, who gathered him close.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Your mother should be real proud of you. Not many boys your age woulda done that.’

I nodded and stood, mumbling, ‘No problem.’

The rest of the day felt fairly uneventful, consisting of me dodging Boyce Wynn and purposefully not staring at Melody Dover in class, though she whispered that she’d walk over after school. Hesitant about the whispering and the secrecy – we were project partners, after all – I slid a glance at her boyfriend. He glared from across the room, and Wynn grinned like he knew something I didn’t. Not an expression I wanted to see on him.