I’d thought a stupid song could fix anything, that it could help heal a little of his wounds after what he’d gone through.

I was a stupid girl with an even stupider heart. And I’d paid the price.

37

Bay

The Friday after the talent show, I sat on the football field transformed into the setting for our rite of passage. Graduation day. The overcast day meant we weren’t baking in the sun, but my plastic smile felt brittle and tight. I sat beside Piper, taking measured breaths through all the speeches. My mom sat in the bleachers in her sunglasses waving the pennant with my name on it, trying to get my attention in the sea of other parents doing the same thing.

I held it together—barely. The glass was still fragile and the glue hadn’t dried. It might never dry. It was a rush job of piecing myself together just enough to look at from afar. Close up, a strong wind or the wrong word might topple me over.

My row stood and walked the path, filing up behind the last row, taking their seats as they left the stage.

A hand captured mine.

My heart thundered in my veins. The rough callous of his touch brushed against the inside of my wrist.

I tugged it free and kept walking, not letting myself look at him. Dare was in the row in front of me. At the far end. Three seats later and he’d have been in my row, feet from me after the distance I’d put between us since that day.

At the top of the stairs to the stage, I brightened my smile for the pictures and shook hands, taking my fake diploma and waving to my mom in the bleachers. Jumping up and down, she brushed the tears from her cheeks. As much as I hadn’t wanted to come today, she’d needed it. And maybe I did too. It was a little closure to the place where I’d always been TNG. Only now I’d be TGG—The Gone Girl.

Unable to help myself, I glanced at the seat three from the end of the row ahead of mine when I made it to the other end of the stage.

Dare stared right back like he’d been waiting for a gap in my defenses to plead his case with his eyes.

They weren’t filled with rage like before. There was only a chest-aching sadness, his lips parted to say words I’d never hear over the crowd, mic feedback, and congratulations.

I didn’t need to hear them.

This was the end of a chapter. An end to us.

I returned to my seat beside Piper, nostrils flaring and tamping down the urge to look his way.

All the reasons I’d come up with before were even more in my face now. I was leaving and so was he. What would trigger his next freak out? A missed call? A picture on social media? Another song I wrote?

Piper squeezed my hand. At the instruction of Michelle, our class valedictorian, we shifted our tassels from one side of our caps to the other.