The day I came home from school and found them both dead on the floor from a bad batch of heroin. There’d been an epidemic of ODs that month as the tainted smack killed off users across the city. The newspaper had been almost happy, despite the loss of life, that there were less users lining the city streets.

They didn’t think about kids like me, who had to be placed in a foster home at ten, angry at a world that didn’t care that my parents were dead. There’d been no one left in the world who gave a damn about ten-year-old River Cooper. At least, until I found Devan and Alana.

Fuck, I missed her.

“Alana would be laughing her ass off about this, don’t you think?”

Devan huffed. “Man, after she got over being jealous that Rigby picked someone who wasn’t her. She had the hugest crush on him.”

It was understandable. Rigby was everything she’d never had. Stability. Loyalty. Kindness. It was the same reason he’d wiggled his way into our hearts, and maybe if I’d swung that way, I’d have had a crush on him too.

“He never saw her like that.” Part of it was out of loyalty to us. We saw her as a little sister, so he saw her as one too. But part of it was that she just wasn’t his type, I think. There was something about Alana that was needy, like she was always trying to fill the hole left from her childhood with something. Hobbies, travel, men. But you couldn’t stuff a bandaid inside a wound and hope it helped. You needed to heal the wound yourself. Alana had never really learned that lesson, and it would be something I’d regret for the rest of my life—that I hadn’t helped her enough.

We were quiet for a little longer, lost in our own thoughts. I didn’t think too hard about what Rigby and Nova were doing upstairs. Because I was jealous. Not that she was with Rig, but that she wasn’t with me. It was a weird line, and if someone had told me two weeks ago that I’d be sharing a woman with my two best friends, I probably would have punched them in the jaw. But it was working, I think.

“Tell me about how things are going with Nova,” I said softly into the night air.

Devan’s lips curled into a smile. “She’s really something. It hurts me to say this, but I think Rigby was right.”

I laughed, because if the trade-off to having Nova was to listen to Rigby gloat about being right forevermore, I could deal with that. “It doesn’t weird you out that Rigby is probably up there fucking her right now?”