It didn’t even end with your mom going through your stuff a year later to make room for the new baby—the replacement Weeks child.

Maybe that was when it started. With what your mom found.

I thought being the girlfriend of a boy who’d blown his head off was rock bottom. I thought I’d been through hell.

But I can’t come out of this. Hell isn’t a hallway between two better places. It is a chasm, so deep and wide that the more I try to pull myself out, the farther I fall in.

There is no way I’ll ever get out.

The best I can do is try to make myself comfortable.

754 Days Before

Kane Weeks likes to be first at everything.

He was the first kid to learn to tie his shoes in kindergarten. The first of us to use the f-word, the first to get drunk, the first to own a cell phone.

So it was only natural that he was the first to have sex.

It was years ago, and that eventful. Everyone knew about it. I know, because I was the one he had sex with.

Kane’s had a long line of girls since then. But it’s hard for me to forget, since he’s it. The one. The only. The end.

I was his first too. We were fifteen, too cool to play in all the snow that had graced us with a glorious three-day weekend. Instead, we sat cross-legged on the shag carpet in Kane’s room, playing some zombie video game. I kept losing. After my brains were eaten for the hundredth time, I threw down my controller and shouted obscenities at the television, then turned to him, about to ask what we should do next.

As usual, he read my mind. He quirked a quarter smile at me and drew out a mischievous “So…”

That one word, coming out of Kane’s mouth, always means trouble. His blue eyes turned stormy, and his hair fell into his face in a way that recently made my heart flutter. I hated that flutter, hated that the charm I’d been immune to all my life suddenly had an effect on me. At fifteen, he’d never had a gangly or awkward day in his life. He said, “Don’t you ever wonder what it’s like? What all the talk is about?”

“Um. What are we talking about?”

“You know,” he whispered, checking the door. “It.”

Oh. It it. It consumed everyone at the school like the plague. Everyone spoke about it, whispered about it, joked about it. You couldn’t avoid the subject, but I did my best. In a lot of ways, it was even scarier to me than that clown in Stephen King’s It.

But nothing scared Kane.