I wasn’t sure if I could even trust Olivia at all. About anything. After what Heath had said about Olivia telling him about the messages – and she told people about what I’d said at the funeral – it was clear she no longer had my best interests in mind. I didn’t think she cared about me at all. But the fucked-up part was that I didn’t care. Was that really friendship, then? We had no reason to even be around each other any more; it was one thing when we were younger, because everyone has something in common when they’re younger, but now we were growing in entirely opposite directions, the void expanded by death, and there was so much doubt and uncertainty and it was all death’s fault. It was all death’s fault. What hadn’t death ruined? What was left?

Things felt strained and there was nothing left to say. Clearly she didn’t want to talk to me and I didn’t really want to talk to her. It was like holding on to a tooth that was only attached by the thinnest stringy bit of flesh and I just wanted to pop.

In the second week of January, we were sitting at lunch while she was talking about some cast-member drama that’d happened at rehearsal for the spring musical, and to be fair, I wasn’t listening, but she just looked at me and said, ‘You don’t want to be here, do you?’

I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything. Just looked at her face. I saw it as it had been when we were six, doing dumb stuff and playing Ghosts and kickball, and that time one of our neighbour’s dogs got eaten by a coyote so we took it upon ourselves to hunt them. Things were so simple then and so horrible now.

After that I mostly ate lunch in the computer lab, slipping bits of sandwich out of my bag while scrolling mindlessly through Reddit.

But June was always a constant. June stayed.

Ten minutes there. Ten minutes back.

One night I did the math – I’d spent thirty-three hours in her car. That seemed like a lot of hours to me, given that the additional seven hours between seeing her in the morning and in the afternoon were dedicated to her too. Sometimes I worried that I liked to think about her more than I liked to be with her. But then I’d spend those ten minutes with her again, and I realized nothing compared, nothing compared to June in control, eyes flickering, laughing. I couldn’t get enough of her.