“You knew CPR?”
He nodded. “Mama made us take classes when my dad bought a new boat.”
Traffic lights flickered across the auto bridge in the distance. The vise on my chest crushed harder, and I knew I couldn’t make peace with water. Not until I gave up a secret that was clawing at the back of my throat, trying to get out.
“I wasn’t clumsy,” I confessed.
Fen’s arm stiffened next to mine on the railing. He didn’t respond or look at me. I didn’t want him to, or I couldn’t tell him the rest of it.
“I wanted to know how it felt to fall,” I continued in a small voice. “I didn’t want to die. Eddie and I had just been across the walkway, in the woods.… Nothing really happened. He was too drunk. And then he just left me there, in the dark. He wanted to be with his friends.”
Fen made a noise, but he didn’t say anything.
I looked down at Frida and brushed away streaming tears Icould no longer control. “I never told anyone because it was so dumb. Just a lapse of reason for a single moment, and it completely changed my life. I was only trying to get his attention. What kind of idiot am I?”
His head lolled as he processed what I was saying. But it was too late to take it back. And I guess I was glad to finally be relieved of the burden. The secret had an unexpected weight that had been holding me down for so long.
I wanted to thank him for listening to me. For not judging. He turned from the railing and stared at me, face contorted with feral emotions that I couldn’t identify.
Was he… mad at me?
“I’ve never told anyone else this,” I said. “Are you angry that I told you?”
“I’m something.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means just that. Something.”
“Fen—”
“Yes, I’m upset, okay? If you think what you just told me is no big deal, then you wouldn’t have kept it a secret.”
True. I couldn’t argue with that.
“You asked me why I rescued you?” he said in voice that sounded like thunder. “Remember? You couldn’t figure out why I of all people would jump in the water after you.”
“Yes. I did wonder that.”
“It was because I was head over heels for you, okay?”
His words jolted through me. It couldn’t be true. We’d nevereven hung out before this summer. Barely even spoken. Not for years. “How?” I said, blinking. “Since when?”
“Since forever. Since we were kids, and I tore up my leg at a fundraiser for local musicians downtown. You were there with Velvet and Mad Dog, remember?”
God. I did remember. We were fifteen, and though we’d run into each other before, that was the first time we spent more than a few minutes in each other’s presence. “We talked about K-pop.… You cut your leg on a rusty nail—that’s… when my dad drove you and your mother.”
He didn’t have to answer. I knew I was right.
I thought about how he reacted when I first saw him at Victory Vinyl. How weirdly intense it had been between us. His Ophelia tattoo. Why I couldn’t stop thinking about him when I should have been thinking about my own boyfriend.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered.
“How do you tell someone that they’re your entire world when they’re staring at the person next to you?”
“How could I be your entire world when you didn’t know me?”
“How could you get so sad about a boy you didn’t even really know that you’d fall in the water because of him?”
