“I should’ve been there,” Aidy whispered. “I knew better than to take my eyes off you for a single second. But I let you convince me, like I always did.” She took her first sip of her spilling drink, then spit it back into the cup, glaring at Harrison. “Everyone knows what you were doing that day, but do you have any idea what we were doing? The real reason we didn’t stay?”

This broke the spell she’d cast over the room. Bigs and Teeny and Harrison all advanced on her, backing Nick and I into the corner closest to the closet. Ruby hung back, instead crawling onto the windowsill to sit on the blackout curtains, her arms wrapped around her knees.

“It’s kind of perfect, actually. It’s like you knew without having a single clue. We were writing a letter.”

“Aidy,” Teeny warned.

“We were never going to talk about this again,” Harrison added, so aware that he was saying the wrong thing but so incapable of stopping himself. He grabbed at his throat as if battling against the words.

“And has it helped?” she asked him. “Every time you drink, you start slurring about it. Not in obvious ways, but I’m pretty sure all you’d need to do was blink, and I’d know what it is you’re thinking, because I’m thinking it too.” Aidy laughed like she’d finally gotten to the punchline of a joke years in the making. “We were kicking Marley out of the group. Calling her superficial and self-centered and clearly too good for the Albany kids. You’ll be happy to know that your little Ruby wanted no part of it. She’d come with us that day to put up a fight over it. No one listened to her, so she closed herself up in your room to pout.”

Ruby tucked her head into the space between her knees.

She’d never told me.

Aidy sneered. “If you’re wondering why every one of us got our asses on our bikes and pedaled for our lives over to Cadence Park on the night of the memorial, now you know. No one cares about what you’ve done. Honestly. What they care about is whether any of it is true. If there really is anything left to hold on to. Some sort of forgiveness Marley can give us, even though she never even knew we did anything wrong.”

Aidy’s anger crashed into me with the volatility of a hurricane wave. For years I’d used Marley as my shield, pinging back everything I didn’t want to touch me. But she couldn’t protect me from what she never knew herself, and I was too weak on my own. The Marley I carried struggled to hang on to my fragile frame. She wrapped around my throat, pressing into my trachea. The room shrank, everyone becoming miniature while I remained life-size.