I wasn’t just living with Tru.
I was haunted by him.
CHAPTER 23
TRU
If I ever wrote a book about this, I’d call it: How to Lose Your Best Friend and Still Breathe.
It started small.
One of my drawings disappeared from the bulletin board. When I found it later, it wasn’t shredded into confetti, just folded into an origami crane perched on my pillow.
Then my gym shorts went missing. They turned up the next day hanging from the ceiling fan. A day later, someone had squeezed an entire travel tube of paste onto my toothbrush and left it foaming in the cup. It tasted so strongly of mint it burned.
None of it was cruel. Just… Dare. A thousand little jabs, trying to prove he could still get under my skin.
I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t accuse. But every time I caught his eye, he was already looking away. The silence between us was a game he’d invented and was winning.
It was exhausting, walking on eggshells in a room the size ofa shoebox. Every breath threatened to set him off. Every glance, every sigh, every second I spent just existing near him was trespassing on something private.
He didn’t seem to study much. I’d never seen him crack a book for more than a minute. Meanwhile, I was all in—first row in my classes, answering questions like a nerd, staying late to clean up the studio. I loved it. I loved being here.
But the moment I unlocked our dorm room door, it was as if the air got sucked out of my lungs.
At night, it was the worst.
There were only a few feet between our twin beds, the glow of my phone screen, and all the unspoken words suffocating me. This used to be the time we whispered stupid secrets, lay side by side and imagined our futures.
If ten-year-old me had told ten-year-old Dare that someday we’d share a dorm at the same college, he would’ve been ecstatic. Now, I lay there in the dark, frozen. I hear him breathing. Sometimes I hear him shift, because maybe he was awake too. Sometimes I thought he was waiting for me to say something.
Tonight, I finally did.
My voice came soft, barely more than a whisper, as if the volume itself might scare him off. “What did you use to wish for? Back then. When we were kids.”
There was a long pause. I thought maybe he was going to ignore me like he usually did.
But then, quietly—so quiet I almost missed it—he said, “That your mom would adopt me.”
My heart twisted. Such a simple, innocent wish. Childlike and honest. And it hit harder than any jab he’d thrown my way.
“I never stopped being your best friend,” I said, staring into the dark. “Even when you hated me.” Even though you still do.
In the silence, I could almost hear him remembering—birthday candles, late-night movie marathons, afternoons under the skateboard ramp where it was just the two of us against the world.
And when I glanced sideways, he was already looking at me. His expression wasn’t sharp for once. His face was open, vulnerable, and for just a second, he was that boy again.
Then he blinked, and the shutters slammed closed. Dare rolled over, his back to me now.
The cold returned so fast it almost stung.
Sometimes I get the urge to talk to him.
Not the version of Dare who rolled his eyes, stole my gym shorts, or arranged my watercolor pencils into an L for loser. I meanthim—the boy I’d trusted with every piece of me. The one who used to know I was upset just by the way I tied my shoes.
I guessed that version was long gone. So I wrote to him instead.
I’d been keeping the same journal since we stopped really talking. I never planned it; it was born out of loneliness. One day, I’d opened a blank page and started writing like he was still listening. I’ve told myself a hundred times to stop writing, that he doesn’t deserve this space in my head. But every night, my hand still reaches for the pen as if it remembers what it feels like to be wanted.
