I’d made plans with Nina to go prom-dress shopping, even though I knew I wouldn’t be going. For years, prom dresses were a big topic of conversation, so it only seemed right for me to shop with her. The few times we’d shopped together, she’d come to really value my opinion, since I was honest and blunt.

“Oh, you know. Something to make Jav’s tongue wag like a dog’s over what he’s missing,” she says, smiling. “You are really so great for doing this with me, girl. I can’t thank you enough. But you can still come to prom yourself, you know.”

I scrunch my nose. Once upon a time, I’d imagined going to Declan’s senior prom, and him coming back from his freshman year at college to escort me to mine. But the junior prom I’d gone to with Declan, the one where he’d sung me that goofy song, was enough. It had been a long time since I’d had prom dreams beyond that. “It’s okay.”

“But are you okay? I heard about your talk with Luisa.”

I groaned. Yeah, and so had most of the school. “Did you know she was in love with Declan?” I ask.

She guns it through a yellow light that turns red the second we’re through. “Oh. Um. I heard something about that. Yeah. Kind of a cluster, huh?”

“I guess I must have blocked it out. But they were seeing each other,” I remark.

I study her for any reaction, but there is none. So she knew all along. Maybe I was the only one in the whole school who thought Declan was faithful to me. She says, “Do you really think he didn’t kill himself?”

So, Crazy Hailey’s wild conspiracy theories have reached the outside world. I have no doubt who’s responsible for that. I told only one person my theory—Kane. And he told Luisa. And Luisa won’t shut up, especially if it’s damning gossip about me. “I don’t know anymore. I mean, maybe he did. He had a lot of guilt, and I never knew it. He kept it inside. I obviously didn’t know him as well as I thought.”

“You knew him well, Hailey,” she says. “He was a saint in a lot of ways. But even saints are human, you know? They make mistakes.”

“But they atone for them.”

“Who says he didn’t?” she says. “Maybe that’s what he thought he was doing when he got out the gun. Maybe he thought it was the only way to make up for what he’d done.”

19 Days Before

I knew it wasn’t working.