He didn’t laugh. He changed tactics. “Yo, Makayla, do you remember when we met?”

“We were just kids,” I said. “I don’t remember.”

“I do,” he said. “We were thirteen. It was before I started riding my bike, and I was just this scrawny, goofy kid with big ears. Mike Baylon kept beating me up after school. You remember Mike Baylon?”

“Holy shit, yeah,” I said, slapping him lightly on the shoulder. “He always wore his older brother’s hand-me-downs until he grew into them, so half the time he was swimming in his clothes. I haven’t thought of him in years.”

“He kept beating me up after school, until this one day, he was handing me my ass, and you came around the side of the school eating a push-up pop. You had that shit dripping down your chin, and your tongue was blue from it. And you walked up to that bastard Mike Baylon and pushed him down on the ground.”

“I did?” I said. If I had, it was just one of many fights I’d been in as a kid.

“Right on his ass. And he wasn’t afraid of me, but he was afraid of you, because you took on kids twice your size all the time. And you started yelling at him. I still remember what you said.”

“Well? What did I say?”

“‘Mike, just because you have mother issues doesn’t mean you have to go around being an asshole!’“

“Oh, shit, didn’t his mom die when he was little or something?” I blushed remembering.

“Yeah, I think so,” Jaden said. “But you know what? He never touched me again.”

“So what does that have to do with mistakes?” I asked, coming back around to where he’d started the conversation.

“The mistake I made then was that I didn’t kiss you the minute you did it,” Jaden said. “I decided that I would wait until the block party the next weekend to try. And by then you were going out with Erik Lee.”

“You had a crush on me as a kid!” I said, laughing. I couldn’t believe I was laughing, not with how bad things seemed. “You never told me!”

“You never noticed,” Jaden said. “You had a new boyfriend or girlfriend every week when we were growing up. I was just that kid with big ears.”

I noticed that Jaden has stopped laughing. I stopped, too. “It wasn’t like that,” I said. Then, I started feeling that tight feeling in my head again. The one that I hated and could never make any sense of. That feeling like the world is always coming at you, and your head, the corner you’re backed into, just keeps getting smaller.

“Jaden?” I said, my voice rising. “Why are you telling me this now? What the hell do you even expect me to do with that, right here while we’re waiting to see if we’re gonna live or die?”