“I didn’t believe her,” he continued. “I came back when I knew you were home from camp. I could never seem to catch you. It was always Aidy telling me the same thing. And you didn’t try to find me or anything. After a while, I decided she must’ve been right.”

Aidy listened. She supported.

She built me a titanium backbone made of lies.

“It wasn’t like anyone was really trying to talk to me after it happened anyway.” His feet kicked harder into the ground. “Especially not the kids at my new school. My story was too hardcore even for the alternative school.” He tried out a laugh that sounded more like a cough. “Not that I didn’t earn my way into that place with the other stuff I did. Guess I felt like nothing could ever be worse than what I’d already done.”

I’d spent the first week of school still away at camp. Ruby told me stories of what happened. Nick was starting fights in the hallways over nothing. Standing up in the middle of tests and screaming. They determined early on he wouldn’t be tried for what happened, so first they’d put him into extensive counseling. He was just a kid, after all. But with the outbursts and mayhem, they decided a different environment would be better, so they sent him several miles away to a small school for kids with various behavioral and adjustment challenges. He rode a bus that picked him up at six thirty in the morning and dropped him off at five thirty every night.

He started there the very day I came back to Cadence.

“I went to your house once,” I admitted. I’d never said it aloud before. Even without knowing what Aidy had done, I recognized that telling her would only disappoint her. “You weren’t home either. No one was. I sat in your backyard, waiting.”

“I think this is why cell phones were invented,” he said.

“I still had to share one with Aidy, then,” I reminded him. Who knows how many times he’d tried to send me messages that she’d intercepted.

The years of silence between Nick and me had come from believing the people who didn’t work the way we did, which felt like the cruelest hand of all. We had friends and family hiding us from one another. Therapists and counselors who made us interact with other traumatized kids. Kids who’d been through different bad things. We could understand their sadness, but we couldn’t share it. It wasn’t ours. We were the only two people who knew what it was like, and we didn’t have each other.

Of all the things I thought I’d find in the fifth year, Nick was never on the list. But there he was, turning left when we needed to go right, buying more time to hang onto my every word.