“Hey, honey,” I sneer, straightening. “If you want to hook up with Evil Hagrid who kidnaps kids to Homophobic Hogwarts, that’s your business—”

“This is how things work at Nightlight,” Drew snaps back, swooping his supermodel height downward to me like some elegant, furious bird. “You find a friend and stick together. You’re less of a target if you’re together.” Like the passing storm clouds, Drew softens again. “It’s none of my business if you want to get yourself killed, but you should stop trying to dig up stuff on Ricky Hannigan.”

Marcos pinches back a headache while Molly and I draw closer. “Yeah,” I say, “I couldn’t help overhear…sounds like your man told you the whole Ricky story.” Over Drew’s shoulder, Marcos nervously tugs at the hair curling under his ears. Adorable as Marcos is, I hold Drew’s crumbling attention. “Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t need to go poking around anymore and causing all this trouble…if I knew what you knew about what happened to Ricky.”

“You mean, you don’t know anything?” Drew asks, scrunching his nose like I said something rude. “You know it’s, like, a famous hate crime, right?”

Hate crime.

The words plunge the temperature in the jungle by forty degrees. Whatever happened, the news wasn’t famous enough to make it out to Ambrose, Illinois. “I haven’t heard, but you’re a lot more worldly than us, I guess,” I tell Drew, who isn’t immune to flattery. “If it’s so famous, why hasn’t anybody ever heard of Nightlight?”

“Because it didn’t happen here.”

“Where did it happen?”

Until now, Drew has been grinning with the pleasure that he knows infinitely more about what’s going on than the rest of us. But that grin is fading. It seems Briggs’s warning to shut up about Ricky is starting to echo back to him. “Never mind…”

“Remember how Briggs told you I actually met Ricky?” How could Drew forget? Briggs was basically inside him when he told him. “Well, he was a friendly guy. But he got put through hell. Then I delivered him meals because it was difficult for him to get them himself anymore. Then he died, and I don’t know who did this to him. He meant something to me…”

I hadn’t realized it until this moment, but it’s absolutely true: Ricky looked out for me in a way my parents flat-out didn’t and couldn’t. Drew’s Grecian statue of a face doesn’t crack, except for a miniscule eye twitch. He’s thinking about Ricky—and the weight of his story is crushing him. “It happened in California,” he whispers. “My aunt lives there, so I heard about it from her.”

Oh, I know of your aunt, girl. But now isn’t the time for that slice of information.