“Do you want to go bungee jumping tonight?” Jeremiah asks.

He must be joking. “Uh, no?”

“C’mon! It’ll be fun.”

I prop a foot on the coffee table and drape the ice baggie over my knee. “Didn’t you almost lose an eye doing that last year?”

Nick glances over at me, turns the volume down on the TV, and leans closer to the phone at my ear. I push him away.

“My roommate Mason and I are heading over to Pigeon Forge. They have a good bungee platform at Dollywood—it’s completely safe and there’s a balloon to land on, in case something goes wrong. They have safety certificates and everything.”

“No way.”

“It’s only, like, a hundred feet high.”

A gasp escapes my lips. That’s, like, ten stories. Is he crazy? “That can’t be safe.”

“It’s completely safe,” Jeremiah says. “I’ve done it at this place at least five times.”

I hate the idea of not being able to help him if something goes wrong. Because that’s what would happen. Say he fell off the platform the wrong way. Or the bungee cord snapped. I wouldn’t be able to push undo like on a computer.

“I can’t,” I say.

“You won’t come?” Disappointment laces his voice.

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this. I mean, didn’t your mom ask you not to? Don’t you want to stay on good terms with your family?”

“I can’t just quit cold turkey. And this is a perfectly safe way to have fun.”

To get a rush, he means.

“Annie?” His voice wobbles over the phone. “The thing with my eye, it happened on a bridge and the cord was too long. What I did wasn’t safe. I know that now.”

“What about when you broke your arm and the bone grew back wrong? And going to the hospital three times in a month?”

No response.

I have nothing else to say either. This is too much. I like having him as my friend, but I hate the risks we’re both taking. I burrow into Nick’s side and he slides an arm around my shoulders, still entranced by Die Hard.

“Are we still on for the race Sunday morning?” Jeremiah finally asks.

I hesitate before saying, “Yeah.”

He exhales into the phone. “I’ll text you when I get back tonight.”

“I think this is stupid.”

“I’m trying, okay? But I need this.”

I’ve never known anyone on drugs—well, except for kids at school who occasionally smoke weed, but none of the hard-core stuff. But that’s what I’m thinking about when we hang up.

While Die Hard continues to entrance Nick, I use my phone to Google “adrenaline junkie,” the term Matt used to describe his brother. I click on an article about how having sex, eating good food, doing things you love, and extreme sports pump dopamine into your brain. The article says that the effects of dopamine can be stronger than snorting cocaine. Wow. I scroll on, discovering that riding a bike and running can do the trick for some people, but others need bigger and better thrills to get an adrenaline rush. Some pro athletes who went to the Olympics later suffered major depression and now turn to extreme sports or drugs in search of a fix for that lost adrenaline.

Another recent article says a man tried to break a free-diving record by going more than two hundred feet below the water’s surface without any gear and died after he resurfaced. My heart aches for his family and friends…

The scariest part? The article says falling in love with the right person can trigger more dopamine than extreme sports and drugs combined.

A shiver races through me.

He made me feel so alive that day by the river. Yeah, the guilt ate at me, but I still get goose bumps just thinking about his hands on my skin and his lips warming mine. But that feeling is not worth the risk of losing somebody again. I need to know the people I care about are safe and sound. Maybe I shouldn’t hang around somebody I could lose just like I lost Kyle.

I try to put Jeremiah out of my thoughts, but all night I’m on edge until I get his text.

Until I know he’s all right.

Marathon Training Schedule~Brown’s Race Co.

Name Annie Winters

Saturday

Distance

Notes

April 20

3 miles

I’m really doing this! Finish time 34:00

April 27

5 miles

Stupid Running Backwords Boy!!

May 4

6 miles

Blister from HELL

May 11

5 miles

Ran downtown Nashville