“If she made me do this,” he started, his voice shaking.

“Don’t go there.”

“Isn’t that where we’re going anyway?”

It felt funny to teach him a lesson he should already know. The first lesson I learned when the bullet hit Marley. The one I’d taught Aidy only hours before. “You know what I do when I’m stuck in a room with no exit? I rearrange the furniture,” I told him.

“Well then, I think I’ll take this chair,” he said, not a second’s worth of hesitation, miming one in front of him, “and smash it through the wall.”

“I promise you the wall won’t budge.”

Nick stopped us. He turned to look at me. A heavy seriousness spread out over his face. “I promise you it will.”

What was there to say? Nothing. There were no words to fix my heart hammering into my chest, shaking and shifting, spray-painting Nick’s name over every internal piece of me, my whole body now leaning into his, frenzied by his face. His heart. His words. His promise. If I let him really see me, he would find all the falsities I leaned on to help me wobble through my life. And since he was the only person I shouldn’t lie to, I lied to him the most. “I don’t know about that,” I said, fighting so hard, calling out for Marley, asking her to stop what I knew was going to happen next.

She didn’t.

She couldn’t.

Nick’s lips touched mine: an answer, a silence, a stop to the start of everything. Mine pressed back: a question, a loudness, a start to stopping everything I’d done. I pulled him closer to me, felt as he became weightless in my arms, surrendered to this. To us.

This was why the battle had started. For everything to clatter and clang around us as we came together. “Shit,” I said as I pulled back, my eyes on his shirt, not his face, knowing if I looked again, even for a second, he would see. And he would leave.

“What?” He tilted his head down so he was again at eye level. His mouth pressed into a sideways crescent moon. We kissed again.

And I didn’t mind.

I had no mind.

“I promise,” he whispered, our mouths still touching.

When I got home, I locked myself up in my room, pulling out Bigs’s letter to distract myself from the impossibility of what had just happened.

XANDER CAMPBELL

Welcome to the Adventure. Eyes on your own paper, please.

Hi, Bigs! Hi, hi, hi! How are you? You’re standing there, saying nothing, aren’t you? Answer me! Not in your head. Out loud.