As he started to ask her something else, she interrupted him. “Why do you care so much?”

“What do you mean?”

“You kind of disappeared once high school started. No offense,” she added. “And now…”

Abe sighed. “Like I said a few weeks back … high school is…” He focused on their dad’s Red Wings keychain hanging from the rearview mirror as if it would give him some answers. “Really different.”

“I feel like you’re speaking in code,” she said.

“Sorry.” He took a sip of his drink. “It’s just, this whole list thing? Man, it reminded me how middle school can be, like, the worst. And you’ve been going through it all this time, and I…” He paused, seeming to search for the right words.

Eve wondered if he even knew that she’d missed talking to him.

“Listen.” Abe leaned toward where she sat, pink-faced, in the passenger’s seat. “I wasn’t always so nice to everybody in middle school. Especially to girls.”

Abe? Abe, her big brother? She knew he hadn’t always been nice to her and Hannah, pinning them down and pulling their hair and all that, but she couldn’t imagine him being like Brody or Caleb or Curtis or the other kids who mocked her and threw water on her chest.

“Really?” Without thinking about it, Eve lifted her mask and let it sit on top of her hair like a headband. “How were you not nice?”

“Lots of ways. Like I laughed at jokes that I knew weren’t okay at all.” Abe appeared to tighten his grip on his hot chocolate. “Even ones about my own girl friends, sometimes.” She saw him shake his head as if he were trying to get rid of a thought.

“Why?”

“I didn’t get how much it was hurting them, I think. And I didn’t believe that it would matter if I said anything. Like I was … helpless or something…,” he muttered.

“Did you rate them?” Eve asked softly, afraid of the answer.

“No.”

Eve began to say “Good,” but Abe interjected.

“But I saw that kind of stuff and I probably joked about it,” he admitted. “Maybe that’s why some girls I was friends with back then aren’t so eager to hang out with me now.” He let out a sad laugh. “Can’t really blame them. I didn’t stand up for them.”

That sounded like Eve. Not Abe.

“Look.” He turned to her. “Not everyone figures out how to be good to other people until way later. I didn’t. I wish I could take back the times I just sat there or added some stupid comment I thought was clever while other guys said awful things. I wish I hadn’t cared if those guys liked me. But I can’t take it back. And I regret it.”

Eve thought of Nessa telling her, “This, too, shall pass,” on the morning after the list came out.

But some things did stick.

“Did you ever apologize to anyone?” Eve asked him.