He could be mine, still.

Why didn’t I have this reaction when I should have—two weeks ago?

I reel back through all the things that have happened to me since our falling-out, and other than Dad dying, nothing else feels all that significant. It’s as if life was just on hold, I was moving along, getting things done, but not really living. Is that awful, or fantastic? I have no idea.

Sabrina’s hand comes over mine on the picnic blanket, and I meet her eyes, wondering how much she reads on my face.

“Okay there?” she asks, and I nod, forcing a smile and wishing like hell I believed it.

then

twelve years ago

The only reason I made it through freshman and most of sophomore year was because of Elliot—and Dad’s willingness to spend nearly every weekend up in Healdsburg. The weekends we were up there were spent reading, tromping through the forest, and on occasional outings to Santa Rosa. Once, Elliot and I even ventured together as far as a concert all the way down in Oakland. Elliot was more family than friend, but over time, he became more personal in some ways than family, too.

But what all of this closeness meant was that whenever we missed a weekend at the cabin, the intervening weeks seemed interminable. We both did well in school, but I hated the social posturing and politics of high school friendships. Nikki and Danny felt the same about it, and were always zero drama—we spent lunch together every day as a group of outcasts-by-choice, sitting on a sloping patch of grass and watching most of the chaos unfold.

But after school, Nikki went to spend time with her grandmother, Danny went home to skateboard with the kids on his street, and I carried out my weekday routine that felt nearly ritualistic: swim practice, homework, eat, shower, bed. That we did nothing together outside of school made it hard to form very tight emotional bonds with them, but all three of us seemed oddly fine with it.

As spring of sophomore year wound down, I grew acutely aware of Elliot becoming . . . more. Not only intellectually, but physically, too. Seeing him only on weekends and during the summers made it feel like I was watching a time-lapse video of a tree growing, a flower blooming, a field sprouting across the year.

“Favorite word.” He shifted on the pile of pillows, eyes moving over me. They were doing their own catch-up, apparently.

It was May 14, and I hadn’t seen Elliot since my sixteenth birthday weekend in March—the longest we’d gone in nearly two years. He was . . . different. Bigger, somehow darker. He had new frames, thick black ones. His hair was too long, his shirt stretched tight across his chest. His jeans skimmed the tops of his black sneakers. New jeans, then, too.

“Tremble,” I said. “You?”

He swallowed and replied, “Acerbic.”