Mom called my dad and said that I was turning into someone who couldn’t bear to stay still, like him. They went on a few dates right after college, but it never turned into love and marriage. It dead-ended in me.

Dad was always traveling for work, and I remember Mom laughing like my night-wandering was a practical joke he’d played on us, leaving his genes to ripen inside of me and grow into dark, restless flower.

To anyone outside of our family, it started in October of sophomore year. I had a feeling about where I was supposed to eat lunch one day, and it pulled me toward the picnic tables in the courtyard, where sunshine tumbled down. I walked out of the cafeteria with my saran-wrapped sandwich and found Mia Livesy sitting on the last inch of a bench like the rest of it was crowded with people, only she was alone.

And crying.

Mia and I weren’t really friends, but she looked at me sometimes like maybe she wanted to be, so I sat down and put my hand on her shoulder. Just perched it there, ready to take flight at the smallest sign that she didn’t want me.

Then it was salt in my mouth, skin under my hands where Mia’s skirt and her shirt didn’t quite meet.

It was done as abruptly as it started, and Mia sank back into crying, deeper this time. Her tears fell into cupped hands, and when I tried to catch them instead, Mia told me in a shipwrecked voice, “Get away from me. Go.”

I ran on numb feet.

I hadn’t been the solution to Mia Livesy’s crying. I had been the reason. Or at least part of it.

That night, I slept for the first time in months, all the way through the night, and woke up with my fingertips perched on my lips. There had been a smile there. The memory of it was as warm as ten blankets.

If I was going to keep doing this, there had to be rules, and the first one wrote itself: no crying girls.

Danny: Now

Igive the Grays space after the morning assembly, but I feel every inch of it. I walk by myself, thinking about how today might have gone if the widowmaker had stabbed empty ground. Would Sebastian have played it cool as soon as we were in public? Would he be walking in step with me right now, trying to touch my hand?

My new locker is at the very end of one of these open-air hallways. I dump my books, distracted by the pine-and-dirt taste of the air, the way it comes and goes as it pleases. Who designs these California high schools? Do they actually trust the students not to wander away between classes?

Why?