“Because I’m not sending her walking home alone in the dark, Lucas. You wouldn’t either.”

He grumbled something, flicking what remained of the cigarette into the dirt and stubbing it out.

“Look, Jessica likes to pretend her life isn’t going to be the dull suburban dream her parents set her up for,” I said. “So she riles people up, gets the reaction she wants, and dips. That’s how it goes. That’s how it’s always gone.”

“Might go differently if we were a little pushier about it.”

I looked over at him in surprise, but I’d thought the same thing. None of us had ever pursued Jessica — we simply ended up thrown together, clashing like billiard balls knocked aimlessly around a table. It wasn’t from lack of desire, it was from simple realism. She wasn’t meant for us. She didn’t exist in our world; she visited it, had a look around like a tacky tourist, and left the moment it got too real for her.

She was the girl we couldn’t have, no matter how close she got. Despite the games we played, the decision was hers in the end. It was her choice.

And the choice was never us. It couldn’t be us.

“There’s nothing to push for,” I said, as if it were really that simple. “She’s going to get out of Wickeston and move on to bigger and better things. She’ll find some good-looking dumbass who fits her aesthetic, get married in a flashy ceremony, and spend the next twenty years having boring sex and becoming best friends with her vibrator, before she divorces him in a mid-life crisis. She’ll be that chick who moves to Vegas for a fresh start and constantly tells everyone about who she was in high school. That’s it. No us involved.”

His chest rumbled slightly, and when I looked over, he was chuckling. “You’ve got it so bad. You have a whole fantasy life laid out for this woman and you can’t even manage a little self-insert? You can’t add a little what-if in there?”

I was too tired for this conversation. “I thought you didn’t want to get involved, so why do you care?”

“Because I can’t stand to see you so fucking torn up over it,” he said. “You can’t let it go. It’s been years of this shit, and you still can’t stop.”

In the illumination from the porch’s light, I noticed something on his neck that I hadn’t earlier: scratches. Long red scratches, doubtlessly from someone’s long pink nails.

I traced my finger over one of them. “You get into a fight with a cat today?” I said, and he scoffed.

“Don’t start.”

“Hey, I didn’t start anything. You’re the one who drove her off in your car and fucked around.”