He pointed at me. “But it was hidden. We never had to hide the porn before.”

“That’s what drove you to the dark side, man? Because you had to hide your porn?”

“Not just that!” he said. “I’ve been here thirty-eight years. I’ve been at this station—day in and day out—longer than you’ve been alive.”

“So you’ve said,” I said. “Many times.”

“I was proud to go there. I was proud to be part of that brotherhood.”

I sighed. “Why can’t the brotherhood have a sister?”

“Because it can’t.”

“Think you might need to check some of that sexism, buddy.”

“It’s not the same with a woman around,” he insisted.

I sighed again.

As weird as it sounds, I actually did know what he meant.

A station that had women working at it could not possibly be a guy-fest in that old-school way. It did have to be something different. It could still be great—I’d seen that in Austin. Better, even. Stronger, as everybody contributed their own personal and gender-based gifts. But he wasn’t wrong. It would be different. “I hear you,” I said. “I probably slightly altered the vibe of the station.”

My empathy just pissed him off. “Damn right, you altered it! And I want it back the way it was!”

Now he sounded like a child. My empathy disappeared. “There are lots of things I want that I can’t have,” I said, making my voice infuriatingly calm. “But I don’t go around terrorizing people and lying.”

“Not yet,” he said. “Give yourself time.”

“Maybe. Maybe when I’m your age I’ll be a bitter old liar. But I hope not. I’m going to fight like hell not to let that happen.”

“Good luck.”

“Maybe you need to find something new to add to your life, instead of just clutching so hard to the past that you strangle it.”

“I didn’t strangle the past,” he said, not looking my way. “I strangled you.”

“You strangled yourself,” I said. “You let your grief make you bitter. You let your suffering make you cruel. Want to know what that makes you? A villain. That’s every comic book villain ever! They suffer, and then they inflict suffering on others. Good guys do the opposite. Good guys suffer, too—but they respond by helping. I know you started out a good guy. You wouldn’t have joined up otherwise. But you gave it all up the minute you broke into my locker with that Sharpie.”

DeStasio wouldn’t look at me. He kept his eyes pointed at the window.

The sight of him like that, so defiant, so unwilling to acknowledge his own role, made me want to push him into a state of empathy. It felt vital not to waste the moment. Before I even realized what I was doing, I said, “That wasn’t the first time somebody wrote that word in a locker of mine, you know. Some girls at my high school beat you to it by like ten years. You’re like a sad knockoff of a mean girl.”

DeStasio didn’t respond.

“Are you wondering why kids at school would be that vicious toward another kid?” I went on. “Or maybe that doesn’t surprise you. Maybe when you look back on your life, all you see is cruelty. But I’ll tell you something. It still shocks the hell out of me. I see that sixteen-year-old I used to be, and she’s so young. So tragically unprotected.”

I let my gaze drift away from DeStasio. I really could see her.

“That’s what I see when I look back. It’s her sixteenth birthday, a Saturday, and her mother is leaving town that day—that same day—to move across the country. Her mother is leaving her dad for someone else, and that’s the day she picks to leave, because of ‘scheduling,’ she says. Hell of a birthday present.

“Can you imagine how angry this girl is? How gutted? When her mother tried to bake her a cake and give her presents the night before, apologizing again and again that ‘the timing isn’t great, honey,’ she wouldn’t touch either. She will never open those gifts, or taste that cake. They will sit on the kitchen table for at least a week, maybe longer, before the girl shoves every item on that tabletop into the kitchen trash.

“Can you imagine what it feels like for your mother to leave you at all, much less on your birthday? Can you even conceive of the abandonment that girl must have felt as she watched her mother drive away?”

Of all the people to share the memory of that moment with … DeStasio. But I needed to make him understand.

I went on. “But then imagine this. Later that day, she gets a text from a boy she’s had a crush on for months—stealing glances at him and doodling his name in notebooks. He’s older. A handsome alpha male, a senior. Totally out of her league. But he tells her he’s noticed her watching him in the hallways, and then he invites her to a party at his house that night. And she wonders if maybe the universe is apologizing somehow. And she puts ice packs on her puffy eyes and she takes a shower and flosses and blow-dries her hair. He says to meet him there, so she walks to his house. It’s at least twenty blocks away—but she doesn’t have a ride. His parents are out of town, and the whole high school has converged on his house, like something from the movies, but far louder and more terrifying. And then when he sees her, he drapes his heavy arm around her shoulders and stays like that for the rest of the night, talking to his guy friends and handing her cups of spiked punch, as if she’s something that belongs to him.

“And the whole thing is so weird and foreign and not quite what she wanted, but she’s so lost and heartbroken and it feels so nice to belong to someone—she stays.

“You know it’s not going to end well, right? No love story starts out like this. You’ve been on enough calls to know exactly where this night is headed. But she doesn’t know. She’s never even been kissed, not really. She thinks she’s on a date. She thinks she’s had a stroke of good luck. I want to march right in there and grab her stupid, naïve hand and drag her outside to safety. Dumb girl. I’d slap her right now, if I could. I’d shout some sense into her.

“But then, when she’s good and dizzy, he says he’s going to take her home. She’s thinking he’s going to drive her. She’s hoping to get a good-night kiss—her first, by the way, besides a few party games. But instead, he steers her out behind his garage. She giggles at first, like he’s made a funny mistake. But then he pushes her down into the mud next to a dead rosebush, and when she tries to get away, he grabs her hair in his fist and tilts her head back so far, she thinks he might break her neck.

“That’s what she’s thinking, on her sixteenth birthday, in the mud: This is how I’m going to die.

“Do I have to tell you what he does next? He pushes her face down so it’s half buried in the mud. Mud fills her nose and her mouth and her eyes as he stops laughing and gets to work. She could have suffocated in that mud, for all he noticed or cared. But she didn’t.

“She won’t remember how she got home. That part goes black. But when she finds herself outside her living room window, her dad is in there watching TV, waiting for her to get home. She waits, crouched down by the back steps, until he gives up, turns off the lights, and goes to bed.