Mainly because it had taken Chloe so long to tell me. She’d only mentioned it at the beginning of the school year, after we’d been dating for close to five months. She brought it up in passing in the creative writing club one day. When we were alone later and I asked her about it, she said it was no big deal. It was just something she’d started doing the previous spring because our teacher, Mr. Hartman, recommended it.

But she never offered to show it to me.

She said she kept it hidden in her room in an out-of-the-way place. Her parents knew she kept it, and she worried they—especially her mom—might snoop.

Since the police went all through their house, and removed computers, phones, hair samples, fibers, and everything else, they must have found the journal. Right?

“Before the cops told me, I didn’t know she was crying on the night of the dance,” I say to Chad. “Or if I did know, I don’t remember now. A lot of that night, ninety percent of it, is just a blind spot. I remember going to her house. I remember all of us going to Hannah’s for dinner. I kind of remember walking into the gym. The music was terrible…”

“It was.”

“And that’s about it. The rest is just…nothing.”

“Remember I got that concussion against Morgantown last year? When I collided with that big dude? I didn’t know my own name when I came off the field The trainer asked me the date, and I said it was 1972. So it might come back, right? It did for me.”

“The doctor says it could. There’s no way to predict. But the more time passes…” I wonder if this is what my grandpa felt like as dementia passed over him like a dark cloud. Did more and more of his life just disappear? It scares the shit out of me to even think about, losing that night forever. “But you didn’t just want to tell me that, did you?” I ask. “What’s really on your mind?”

Chad nods. In profile, he looks like a guy everyone would want to vote for if he ran for class president. But outside of soccer he’s barely involved at school. He’s definitely a person who charts his own path and doesn’t care what anyone else thinks.

He turns to me. “Hannah saw Chloe a little later that night. They were out in the hallway by the big trophy case. Chloe had calmed down. She wasn’t crying. But she told Hannah she had a bigger problem to deal with, more than whatever had been making her cry earlier.”

My knees wobble. “What was it?”

We face each other. A small gnat floats between us, dips and dives in the bright sun.