She wrapped her arm around his biceps and squeezed, cuddling closer to him.
"I didn't have any friends. Who would want to be friends with a little jerk? When I was in fifth grade, I was flunking all my classes. The principal called my mom in and told her that if I didn't start working harder, I'd fail and have to repeat the grade. Nobody liked me, but I didn't want to be a laughingstock. So when my mom said she wanted to get me a tutor, I agreed. This lady was a read hard case. She figured out that I was way behind on reading, and she never let me skip an assignment.
“When I started reading this book about a wizard and his adventures with his friends, I realized that what I wanted most, even more than passing the fifth grade, was a friend. So I started changing how I acted. I joined the wrestling team. I was this scrawny little guy, but I’d had a lot of experience with fighting.
“There was one guy on our school team who saw through the tough guy I showed everybody. Chad." Like before, he choked on the name. "I wanted and wished for a friend for so long that, at first, I tried to be everything he wanted. He wanted to ride bikes, we rode bikes. He wanted to play video games, we played video games. But after a while that got old. I was a stupid kid, but I knew deep down that if somebody couldn't like me for myself, it wasn't going to be the kind of friendship I craved.
“My mom worked a lot. One day, Chad and I were messing around at my house right before she was supposed to be home. We started fighting. It was so stupid. Some dumb video game that he wanted to play and I didn't. We started really wrestling. He punched me, and I ended up with a bloody lip." After all these years, the memories of those last twenty minutes with his friend were broken. There were pieces missing.
"Noah—"
He pressed her leg where his hand still rested. "Better let me finish while I still can."
If she got up and walked away after this, he'd have his answer.
"We both lost our tempers, I think. All of a sudden the wrestling match turned violent. I had him in this headlock that we'd practiced in a scrimmage. But I did something wrong. When I let go of him, he wasn't breathing." He'd crushed Chad's windpipe, but he hadn't known it until later. "My mom came in the door—" He couldn't finish it. He didn't have to.
"He died?" she asked.
All he could do was nod. He'd wanted a best friend so badly, and that desire had led to Chad's death.
Chad definitely hadn't deserved that. Noah had been messed up. He hadn't been able to go back to school. Kids had talked, Chad's parents had been inconsolable, full of rage toward him, which was their right. He’d killed their son. It had taken almost a year, but finally his mom had moved them out of their hometown to Sutter's Hollow.
He'd kept to himself, content to be a loner. Until freshman year, when Cord and Callum had insinuated themselves into his life. They'd been three misfits. Cord with his horrible grandmother, Callum as a foster kid, and Noah. Noah with the secret past.
"Have you ever talked with anybody? A therapist?" Her question was tentative.
He felt amusement, but the feeling was ethereal, gone before he could grab hold. "Mom made me go to trauma therapy for a while."
"Have you ever told anybody else?"
He nodded. Closed his eyes. "I told Cord and Callum. Two days before graduation." For months, he’d felt his secret festering inside him. How could he claim these guys were his best friends when they didn’t know the real him?
He’d made the difficult decision to tell them. Afterward, they’d said knowing about it didn’t change anything. But for the two days leading up to graduation, he’d felt the distance both Cord and Callum had built in their friendship. Like a wall. They were on one side of it and he was on the other.
When the five of them—Noah, Cord, Callum, Iris, Jilly—had gathered at Cord’s place the night of graduation, Noah had brought a six-pack of beer. Not enough to get any of them drunk—so he’d thought—but something to take the edge off. He’d hoped to maybe reclaim the friendship that was slipping away from him.
And when it had started raining, Jilly had driven Iris home. He and Cord and Callum had piled into Cord’s old pickup. Callum had been driving.
And the rain had turned the dirt roads into soupy mud and Callum hadn’t been able to keep the truck on the road. The truck had plowed into a tree and the next thing Noah remembered was waking up in the hospital. Blind.
"And then they both left town," she said as if she was finishing the very thought from his head.
He knew now that there had been extenuating circumstances.
A sheriff’s deputy had come to take his statement in the hospital. The man had tried to talk Noah in circles, demanding to know who’d been driving. Demanding to know where Callum had disappeared to—he’d run off without a word to anybody.
Cord had faced a sham of a trial at the county courthouse. Noah hadn’t been able to attend. He’d still been hospitalized.
Cord had gone up on charges of underage drinking. He’d gotten out of it without jail time, but his awful grandma had driven him out of town soon after the trial ended.
Both of Noah’s best friends had left town. And when they hadn’t called or tried to get in touch with him after months, he’d known.
They'd heard his story and judged him unworthy of their friendship.
Jilly restedher chin on Noah's shoulder and reached her arms all the way around him. She held him like that until his breathing steadied.
How had she not known about this?
