We walk without talking for an impressively long period of time, past the houses with golden ‘fu’ characters pasted over the front doors, the bikes resting against gray tile walls, the wooden planks propped up by uneven stone steps, the floral dresses left out to dry in the warm breeze. But Cyrus doesn’t even seem to register his surroundings. His expression has retreated inward, his shoulders tight. A few times, he sucks in a breath, as if on the verge of saying something, but then he snaps his mouth shut again.

He could be getting ready to confess that he’s a vampire, my brain volunteers. Or he could have caught you looking at him like you want to lick his neck—

I do not want to lick his neck, I argue, kicking an innocent pebble in protest.

I’m your brain, my brain reminds me. You can’t hide anything from me. And it’s painfully obvious how attracted you are to Cyrus, even though you should really cut that out and refocus on the part where you reject him in the most humiliating fashion—of course, you’d need him to actually say that he likes you first—

I tell my brain to shut up.

But just when I think I can’t take the silence anymore, Cyrus says quietly, “I didn’t mean it, you know.”

“What?”

We turn into an empty alley, and he slows down, the sunlight spilling soft over his skin, illuminating every subtle detail. The way he pauses to swallow, his throat pulsing. The nervous shift of his fingers before he slides his hands into his pockets. The intensity in his gaze, his beautiful features entirely serious. “I never meant to lie about you pushing me,” he says, his voice very soft, just audible over the calls of birds in the distance. “Much less get you kicked out of the school. It was all my fault. I was concussed and everything happened so fast, I wasn’t thinking properly—when the teacher asked if someone had hurt me, my first instinct was to say that you did, because I was hurt, but it had nothing to do with the fall itself. I just— It’s so mortifying, but when you told me you never wanted to see me again, I was at a complete loss. I’d never experienced such pain before in my life. And I knew I had screwed up, and I was the only person to blame for the whole mess.”

“What?” I say again, like we’re back at my cousin’s wedding, and he’s speaking in Mandarin faster than I can understand. I might be able to recognize a few words here and there, but strung together, none of them make any sense.