“Where was she?” Tyler asked.
“I don’t know. We never found out.”
“What do you mean?”
“Whatever she’d planned—she didn’t follow through. She just … disappeared.”
“She never came back?”
I shook my head. “We never heard from her again. And we didn’t know her friends, or whoever she’d been hanging out with. Even this girl Meg, who she’d been so close with. Cassie had cut her off toward the end. So we never found out what had been going on. I know I was young, but still—”
“What?” I didn’t answer and Tyler repeated himself, voice vibrant with urgency. “What?” He tugged at me, making me look at him.
“I don’t know. For her to be so unhappy, to just leave. I should have tried to help. I could have done something.”
I realized then that Tyler was crying, thin streams running down his cheeks.
“But you were just a kid. You must have missed her so much.”
I realized then that Tyler was crying, thin streams running down his cheeks.
“Tyler, no. I’m okay. Please don’t cry.”
I pulled him to me. His face against me, wetness spreading across my shirt. “That’s not fair,” he said. “It’s not fair.” I stroked his hair as he clung to me, comforting him in a way no one had ever done for me. We stayed like that for a long time. We didn’t speak and we didn’t need to. We had gone somewhere else, crossed to something, and we could take our time coming back.
Eventually we got up and went to the bedroom.
“I have a plan for us.” An idea had revealed itself to me and taken shape. “You’re all packed for your trip home, right?”
“I thought I would just leave from here. Is that okay?”
“Let’s go away this weekend.”
“Really? Where?”
“I’ll sort it in the morning. But are you game?”
He smiled. “For sure. I’m in.”
In the dark of my room, we undressed each other, our clothes a tangle on the floor. Tyler lay on his side under the covers and pressed his back to me. I wrapped my arms around him, hands folded across his chest, breathing him in. We did not have sex. We lay still in the quiet and for the first and only time, I fell asleep before him.
I woke early and by the time Tyler got up, I had booked the trip: tickets to New York, a hotel on the Lower East Side.
“You’re crazy,” Tyler said.
“Have you ever been?”
He shook his head no.
“Are you excited?”
“Yes.” He almost shouted it. “Was it expensive?”
“It was nothing.” I had put it all on credit cards and would deal with it later. I didn’t care. I loved the idea of spoiling him, taking him on a trip his family couldn’t afford. “There’s some breakfast in the kitchen and then we should get going.”
I’d gotten flights from Akron, farther away; hopefully, anyone from Sawyer would be flying from Cleveland. But I was antsy in the airport as we crawled through security, scanning for familiar faces. I wanted to be in New York already, safe from this school and this town.
“Are you okay?”
