—

“How did you even find this place?” Brent asks, as he fumbles onto the stool next to mine. In his collared shirt and suit jacket, he looks out of place.

“A friend recommended it,” I say. No one in their right mind would recommend this place.

“I like it.” He makes it sound convincing. But rather than feel reassured, I feel a quick pulse of anxiety. Brent is a good liar.

He orders a tequila and I get another whiskey-soda, pretending it’s my first, and the bartender, with a face worn from hard living, doesn’t comment.

“I was gonna call you,” he says. “When you saw Misha at my place…I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea…”

“What idea is that?”

“Misha always had a thing for me,” he says bluntly. Somehow, hearing the words out loud is a relief. Because, of course, thinking back on it, I see that he’s right, that it was always so obvious.

“For a little while, after Kaycee disappeared, she pushed us to…” He trails off, shaking his head. “But I never thought of her that way.” He adds, a little more quietly, “I like you. A lot.”

“I like you, too,” I say. But as soon as I say it, I know it’s not true. In high school, I would have said I loved him. I dreamed of all the improbable ways I might find myself alone with him—a sudden fire that forced just the two of us into one portion of the school, waiting for the fire department to reach us; a flat tire that might leave me stranded only a few yards from his street. But it occurs to me now for the first time that I’m not sure how much of that feeling was simply because Brent belonged to Kaycee. Maybe I always intended revenge. Maybe I wanted to take from her, like she had taken from me.

Or maybe, in a weird way, I thought that if Brent could love me, Kaycee would have to love me, too.

“Why did you kiss me that day in the woods?” I blurt out.

“It was the last day of school,” he says. I can tell I’ve surprised him. “I guess…when I saw you there, in the woods, like you’d just appeared…” He smiles. “It felt like a sign.”

That’s what he said the other night, at the bonfire: that my arrival was a sign. “You were my first kiss.” Immediately, I could punch myself for telling him this. My tongue is slipping. I set down my drink.

Brent smiles, big-wattage. The smile that used to knock the wind out of me in the cafeteria. “You know, back then it seemed like we were really at the end of something. All those girls getting sick, and no one could explain it. It was like Kaycee turned a lie into an actual infection. Like we might all catch it eventually.” He brings his hand to my face, just like he did that night at the bonfire. “Not you, though. I always knew you were just beginning.”