“I can’t believe that happened,” I said as the swing in the pavilion rocked back and forth, creaking against the dark. My emotions were depleted, leaving me numb. Empty. But I’d survived the devastation of the truth. I’d made it out the other side.
I inhaled, my body shaking as my lungs filled with air. I hadn’t cried like that since Nikki died. I hadn’t let any of those emotions take a handle on my brain and just destroy me. I had tonight. In front of cabin two, with a group of campers looking on and Kira waiting in the wings to swoop in and take over.
She was with them now. Loraine would be here soon too, wondering where I was and what was going on. Waiting to give me some inspirational talk I really couldn’t stomach.
“I think it was a good thing it did,” Grant said, his arm warm against my shoulder. His fingertips raked the skin of my arm, leaving goose bumps behind. “There really isn’t a right way to deal with it, but if you don’t handle those emotions, they’ll catch up with you.”
“Like yours caught up with you?”
He nodded, his head resting against mine. He was silent for a minute as his long legs rocked the swing back and forth.
“It took me a good five or six months for it to sink in,” he said. “Getting news like that isn’t easy for anyone, but none of us were expecting to see a cop car roll up. I didn’t expect to be sitting on a couch with my mom, listening to them explain how it happened. Why it happened.
“I knew what they were saying and everything, but that didn’t make it real,” he said. “I think I sat in that living room for weeks, waiting for him to stroll through the door. Waiting to see his smile. Waiting to hear his commentary on ESPN’s NCAA basketball report. I just sat there waiting for him to come back, but he never did.
“It wasn’t until the first basketball game of my eighth-grade year that I actually realized he wasn’t coming back. My mom was by herself in the stands, looking lost in a crowd of families all there to support their kids, and he wasn’t there. He wasn’t relaxing in his stadium seat. Wasn’t analyzing our opponent, or trying to give me a critique on my jump shot. And that was the moment I got angry. That was when it all went downhill.”
“So what did you do?”
“Um, at first I did everything my mom wanted me to do,” he said. “She thought I could go to a handful of family therapists and grief counselors, and they would help me sort out my feelings, but the more she pushed them at me the more pissed off I got. None of them realized how I felt. None of them had ever been there before. So, realizing I was pretty much on my own, I found a different way to deal. Drugs. Stealing. Anything I could do that would keep me distracted from everything I wanted to forget.
“Eventually, those distractions caught up with me. I got caught trying to buy some stuff from a dealer who was actually an undercover cop. He went after me and I ran. I was scaling a fence when he finally caught me. He pulled me off and I hit the concrete hard enough I broke my arm, but it didn’t matter. I kept fighting him anyway.”
“That’s how you ended up here, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “I was in a juvenile detention center for about six months before my mom discovered this place. Once she’d had a chance to check out the facilities and get a play-by-play from Loraine on how everything would go down, I got shipped out here for a last chance at getting myself on the straight and narrow. I think I went from pissed off, to even more pissed off, to I’m going to get myself kicked out, to thinking Loraine was the biggest asshat I’d ever met; but eventually I quit fighting everyone. I didn’t have a choice but to get used to being here, so I got to know the people, started to realize I was making it worse for myself, and changed.”
“Unlike the girl who was willing to go down swinging,” I said, shaking my head.
“I dealt with it my way. You dealt with it yours. That doesn’t mean anyone’s way was better,” he said.
I sighed quietly, letting the pressure off my chest. “It was easier for me to ignore everything and pretend I was normal,” I said, blinking at the concrete in the dark. “Sometimes I think I even convinced myself I was. I would go see Dr. Heichman and listen to him try and talk to me about my feelings, but the whole time I was waiting to wake up and realize this was just a dream. Nikki was fine. She’d be at school on Monday, and we would finish out high school, planning out college and all the amazing things we would do.”
I looked at him, guilt weighing me down. “I’ve never even gone to visit her,” I said. “I must have driven by her memorial a million times, but I can’t get myself out of the car. It’s like standing there would make everything a reality. Like I can pretend it’s just another cross on the side of the road, when it’s more than that to both of us. It was the end of her life. It felt like the end of mine. Does that make me a terrible person, Grant? Am I a horrible friend?”
“You’re neither of those things,” he said, kissing my head. “You were doing the best you could to make it through. That’s all you could do.”
“I could’ve done more.”
“You couldn’t,” Grant said.
He lifted his head, his dark brow furrowed and his hazel eyes filled with concern. “But I could’ve,” he said. “I could’ve made you feel more comfortable. Done something to make you feel like you didn’t have to keep your feelings a secret.”
“I couldn’t talk to anyone about it,” I said, “and you couldn’t have done anything other than what you did, which is be there. You’re the reason I made it this far. Hard as that is to admit, you deserve some credit for putting up with me when I couldn’t even put up with myself.”
“I’ll have to admit, it got pretty hairy sometimes. I wanted a counselor switch so many times I—”
I nudged him and he pulled me closer. The softness in his face contrasted the sharpness in his jaw and nose.
“Fine,” he said. “I kind of liked being around you. Hard as it is to admit, I think you actually managed to knock me down a peg.”
“You kind of liked being around me?” I said, facing him.
“I really liked being around you,” he said. “And I plan on doing that as long as I can. As long as you’ll let me.”
I brushed my lips against his, the touch of his skin and the comfort in his kiss warming me again.
“We have the rest of the summer,” I said.
“No. We have longer than that.”