Early May: Lucas, Dex, and I were driving to minigolf, meeting Rosemary and her little brother, Patrick. And also? We were meeting someone named Coach Pete, although I think I was the only one aware of that.

Coach Pete was not a full-fledged adult like the other coaches of Rosemary’s little brother’s baseball team. He was just a guy taking a semester off college, living in his parents’ garage. And flirting with Rosemary whenever he had the chance. Thursday, at the game Rosemary had dragged me to, he couldn’t stop teasing her about our minigolf plans for Friday. At the end of the night, she had tossed over her shoulder, “If you think you’ve got something to prove, we’ll be there at seven.” She didn’t think he’d come, but I mean … duh.

“What about Dex?” I’d said in the car after the game.

“I’m not his babysitter,” Rosemary snapped. “He won’t even care.”

But Dex did care. When we showed up at the course to find Rosemary laughing through a practice putt, Coach Pete wrapping his arms around her from behind to adjust her form, Dex’s face went bright red. “Who is this?” he growled. At me. As if I had any control over the situation.

“Uh-oh,” Lucas mouthed.

“This is Pete,” Rosemary said forthrightly. Pete flashed the crisp smile that had turned Rosemary into such a Little League fan in the first place, and Rosemary launched into an explanation of how Pete thought he might want to teach PE.

Dex didn’t wait for her to finish. He shouldered his way through our little group, grabbed a club without paying—Lucas took care of that for him—stepped onto the first green, dropped his ball, hit it randomly, and, boom, scored a hole in one, straight through the legs of an obese teddy bear that was frozen in laughter like the Buddha.

He stormed to the next hole, took another shot, got another in the hole on his first try. And on his next turn, same thing.

“What is he, a ringer?” Pete asked Rosemary.

“He’s nobody,” she said.

“No,” Lucas leaned into their conversation to interject. “He, ladies and gentlemen, is the Jack Nicklaus of minigolf.”

A couple of girls our age had stopped to watch Dex. One said something to the other behind a hand. Dex was not aware, but I saw Rosemary shoot them a hostile glare. I rolled my eyes at her. I guess I was feeling a little hostile myself. Maybe anger is contagious.

Or maybe “contagious” is the wrong word. Maybe it’s “inspirational.” Maybe seeing Dex storming from hole to hole, cutting in front of little children taking too long to set up their shots, made me see my own feelings of frustration for what they were.

Dex was sick of Rosemary playing games with him? Well, I was tired of Lucas playing with me. How could Lucas say he loved me and then drive by as if I weren’t even there? How could he not believe me about his dreams? Refuse to even consider my opinion about the marines?

Dex didn’t want Rosemary to keep jerking his chain? I too was sick of never knowing where I stood. I’d been tossing back and forth between sadness that the version of Lucas I’d fallen in love with was gone and blind attempts to pretend that he was still here, and he … he wasn’t tossing at all. He was proceeding with his plan for his life as if it had been written in stone.

But where Dex’s anger translated into flawless play, mine was absolutely debilitating from a minigolf perspective. I took so many swings and sent the ball in so many fruitless directions that Lucas started making jokes about it.

Which I seized on as an excuse to let my anger fly.

He said, “I don’t want to say I’ve found your Achilles’ heel … but I think I’ve found your Achilles’ heel,” and I turned on him, threw my club down at his feet, and said, “Don’t talk to me.”

“What—” he began.

“Don’t even look at me.” He was staring. “This was your idea.”

“Minigolf?” He was smiling as if he thought I was joking.

“All of it,” I said. “You brought me up on the gym roof. You told me you remembered me. You told me you’d come back for me.”

The smile was gone now. “Juliet,” he said. “I’ve explained to you—”

“You’ve explained nothing,” I hissed, because people were waiting to play and they were staring. “Because you know nothing. You’re throwing your life away and you’re acting like I’m the one who’s delusional.”

“Come on,” he said, holding out a hand for me in a gesture that begged for me to see reason. But I didn’t want to see reason. I didn’t want any of this. I wanted time to move backward. I wanted the old—new—whatever. I wanted my Lucas to come back.

Turning my back on him and his uncomprehending gestures, I stormed ten greens ahead to where Dex was just finishing up the course. “I need to get out of here,” I said to him. “And I don’t have a ride. Can you drive me?”

“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all night,” Dex said. Without so much as glancing at the others, he started walking, leaving me to follow. I did.

I didn’t try to talk to Dex in the car. I could see how mad he was, and I didn’t want to get in his way. But when he pulled up in front of my house and broke his silence to say “I am done,” I said, “Me too.”

Dex said, “Every time she looks at me, I think, Maybe this is the time. I’ll tell her how I feel now. But I don’t even know what ‘the time’ means. She doesn’t care about me. She pretends to, but she doesn’t. Do you know what I mean?”

I did. “She doesn’t deserve you,” I said. “She’s my best friend and I love her, but what she’s doing to you—it isn’t fair.”

“I know!” Dex said.

“I haven’t said anything out of loyalty, but I’m sick of loyalty.”

“Me too. I’m sick of trying so hard.”

“I’m sick of Lucas.”

“You should be. And I’ll tell you something. About the hospital.” I was so carried away I barely registered the ping of dread that last word inspired. But I was also relieved—at last someone was talking about it.

“All that stuff you told Lucas’s mom,” Dex went on. “About his dreams and stuff. You believed it. You believed the things he’d said were real. And I know why.” Dex paused. “When you love someone like that, you’ll believe anything.”

If, two hours before, someone had told me I’d be sitting alone with Dex in his car, nearly crying over something he’d said, I would have said they were crazy. But there we were, sharing secrets. And there I was, choking up. It felt amazing to think that he had seen. That even without knowing all the details, he had understood.

“You’re right!” I said. “You should believe people. The problem isn’t with trusting too much. The problem is the people who take that trust and throw it in your face.”

“I am so sick of always feeling like a chump,” said Dex.

“You’re not a chump.”

“Thank you!”

We talked that way for a good half hour. We declared to each other that we were done being someone’s sidekick. Being the person no one listened to. But eventually the anger faded and we were left alone in the car together, feeling the other’s sadness. That was when I got out.

I let myself into the house and stood in the front hall. I was thinking. My mom was at a show with Val in New York—they wouldn’t be back until the next day—so the house was dark. I threw my keys into the basket on the mail table without turning on the lights. I was thinking about the night Lucas and I went to Friendly’s, the night he started telling me what was happening and I thought he was crazy. I was afraid of him then, but I didn’t walk away. I already felt connected. I remember thinking that it wasn’t fair, that I’d already been hooked on him. But maybe now I wasn’t as hooked as I’d once believed.

I decided I would get into my pajamas, curl up on my mom’s spot on the couch, and watch television until I was too sleepy to stay awake anymore. But when I turned to look in the direction of the couch—my hand on the light switch in the front hall—I saw something I couldn’t believe was real. I saw a person sitting in my mom’s spot already. Alone, in the dark, the TV off. When he saw that I’d seen him, he leaned forward so I could see his face.

Lucas? I thought. I guess I was expecting a ghost. But the someone sitting on my mother’s couch in the empty house with all the lights turned off was Jason.