Nick angled himself toward me. I scooted closer. He moved his hand to make room. My head inched toward his shoulder. Every centimeter was its own revelation. I didn’t have to force anything. Didn’t have to pretend. Didn’t even have to speak. Maybe the past really doesn’t have to matter, I thought as I laid my head on Nick’s collarbone. If this is all there is, then this is enough.

I started to tilt my face inward. He started to tilt his down.

Wind rustled through the trees, the exact pitch of Marley’s mischievous, musical laugh. It broke our shared peace like a book falling off a shelf. Nick tensed. He looked at me with eyes that said what words couldn’t. That was her.

I scooted away. The change in distance between us was only inches, but felt suddenly insurmountable. It was all too much.

“I should go back inside,” I said.

Nick stood and reached for my hand again, tilting his head toward the glow of the party. I was so used to being able to see right through people. Knowing exactly what truth would keep the real me disguised. Not with Nick. I couldn’t make sense of a single thing he did.

“Walk in with me?” he asked.

I couldn’t help but grab on to him. It had been so long since I’d gotten myself into real trouble.

Upon seeing Nick and me, Ruby’s cigarette fell from her hand. Her fingers flopped around like live wires as she tried to find it. “Been a while,” she coughed out to Nick as we came closer. Smoke released in a cloud around her face. “Need a cigarette?” Her focus flickered between the ground and the sight of Nick Cline’s hand in mine.

He shook his head no.

“Fair enough,” she said.

Ruby’s black clothes and winged eyeliner and wine-colored ombré hair and occasional nervous cigarette habit all served to disguise how time treated her appearance like a well-preserved relic. Not much ever changed about Ruby Marquez. Soft brown skin and eyes that never judged, even when they probably should, she was the better half of me—only a year older but light-years wiser—yet still young somehow. It might’ve been the kindness in her heart. She picked trash up off the street, no matter how much it seemed to multiply. Looked people in the eye when they asked how her day was going. Hugged with a ferocity and intention that shot through you like a lightning bolt. Or maybe it was the unnatural gruff of her voice, a rasp she’d had all her life that was exactly as she was, too old for someone who looked so young. Or maybe it was me that kept her frozen in time. I was the childhood friend she never gave up on, even when the others did their best to stay cordially distant.