This was a bad idea. I’m never listening to Dr. Bright again.

“Yeah, this is good,” he mutters, setting his tray down and swinging his skinny legs over the bench. The nerves coming off him are like painful sound waves off of a loud speaker—it makes my teeth chatter and my rib cage shake and I really am never listening to Dr. Bright ever again.

“This is a nice spot,” he says when we’ve settled across from each other. He’s taking in his surroundings (avoiding looking at me, I think) and squinting into the sun in a way that makes me think he doesn’t spend a lot of time outside. Now that I’m looking at him in the daylight instead of the heinous fluorescent lights inside the school, I notice how pale he seems. It’s not the actual hue—his skin is darker than mine—but there’s something that tells me he is seriously lacking vitamin D.

“Yeah,” I respond automatically, staring at the dark circles under his eyes. “Yeah, I like it out here. It’s quiet.”

The waves of anxiety pull back a bit and a tingling itchiness reaches under my skin. Curiosity. It doesn’t make me twitch in the way it usually does, but I squirm a bit, wondering what it is that he’s curious about.

I don’t have to wonder, because his eyes open from their squint and look directly at me (making the squirmy feeling worse) as he says, “I’m surprised you don’t eat with the football team. They definitely seem to have a good time during lunch.”

The last part comes out a little bitter and I don’t even need to feel the poker of anger from him to know that he’s resentful.

“They’re not all bad, you know,” I say, trying not to break eye contact even though there’s something about looking directly at him that feels like standing at the edge of a cliff. “Nobody even really likes Bryce all that much. And Justin is an idiot who’ll follow anybody around,” I add for good measure, and because it’s true.

“If they’re so great, then why aren’t you eating with them?” he asks, a challenge in his voice. He’s baiting me and I don’t get why so I try to push through the curiosity and nerves and find what he’s feeling underneath all of that.

I hit a wall. Like, a real, physical wall. That’s what it feels like, at least. Behind the nerves is hard, thin steel. Adam’s trying not to feel something but it’s not working all that well.