“It’s okay, Will.”
I surrounded his shoulders in a hug, but it wasn’t reciprocated.
“I’d be lying if I said that I remember it well. Because I don’t. I really don’t.”
I nodded, barely moving away from him. I wanted to give him a way to speak freely, but William seemed stuck.
“What, Will? What do you not remember well?”
He squeezed both of his hands on his knees, as if that was enough to hide his hands’ trembling.
“It was a nasty accident. There was blood everywhere.”
“What? Jesus Christ, did someone do something to you?”
His eyes blinked one too many times. Each blink moistened his face with tears.
“I don’t know how James found out.”
His story was so confusing that it was hard to put the pieces together.
“That he was there.”
“Who?”
“The swim coach.”
I rubbed my forehead; I couldn’t help it. Following his story was harder than I’d thought.
“I remember that it was a really rough time for me. They’d just diagnosed me, and I didn’t know who I could trust. I thought kids my age would tease me, so I ended up talking about it with him more than once. I trusted him. At some point, James came, and there was blood everywhere . . . on the ground, on his hands.”
“What does James have to do with it?” I breathed, speechless.
But William didn’t pay any attention to me. He was following an imaginary sequence.
“He used the wrench. The one from the toolbox he found on the ground. They were doing work on the pool.”
The wrench.
A light bulb went off in my head. Poppy had told me something about that. She maintained that James had almost killed a guy with it.
“Did James beat the swimming coach with a wrench?”
“Yeah.”
I put both my hands on my face. So it was all true.
“I’m not James.”
I saw his eyes turn a darker gray, and I felt a pressure on my chest that made it hard to breathe. I tried several times to take in oxygen but I couldn’t.
“Will, why did James do something like that?”
But William shook his head no.
“Aside from that, did you tell your parents?”
Wearily, he nodded. I noticed that he was crushing his knuckles between his knees until they turned white.
