The wind picked up, raking through the empty swings and making them squeal.
I shivered.
Dante shrugged off his jacket and draped it over my shoulders. His warmth lingered in the cotton threads.
I tugged the sleeves over my fists, felt the heat seeping into my bones.
“It’s not going to get better, is it?” The question was a pebble dropped into a vast, black well.
He didn’t flinch. “Maybe not soon. Maybe not ever. But sometimes it helps to have somebody who gets it.” His words were careful.
The gesture gutted me. I shook under the weight of his kindness, anger and shame tangling in my throat. I wanted to tell him to take it back, to stop pretending I was worth the warmth.
Instead, I crushed my fists in the jacket’s sleeves and stared at my sneakers.
“You don’t have to babysit me, you know,” I said, voice small and watery. “I’m not going to break.”
He scuffed his boot against the gravel. “That’s not why I’m here.”
“Then why are you here?” I pressed. “Is this some guiltthing? You feel sorry for the girl with the fucked-up family?” My words came out sharper than I intended, but I was tired of being a charity case, tired of people acting like I was a kicked dog in an ASPCA commercial.
Dante’s jaw flexed. “I don’t pity you, Amelia.” He said my name like it hurt him.
He looked so tired. I wondered what it cost him to be good when his best friend was Caiden. What it cost him to be the one in their duo who still had a soul.
The silence grew, crawling between the slats of the bench, pressing in on my chest until I had to speak or suffocate. “He hates me, you know. Caiden. I don’t even know what I did.”
Dante shook his head. “It’s not about you.” He ran a hand through his hair. “His dad, he’s worse than you can imagine. Caiden learned early how to hurt before he got hurt. He thinks if he makes you the target, he’ll be safe.” His voice darkened. “He’s not. Nobody is. Somebody’s always bleeding in his house.”
“I can’t handle being someone’s punching bag forever.”
Dante’s lips curled in a sad smile. “I know. But you take it, every day. That takes guts. More than you think.”
The wind cut through my sweater. I huddled deeper into his jacket, a borrowed shell. “Some days, I want to disappear.”
He didn’t say anything for a while. I wondered if he, too, ever wanted to vanish, if the world’s rough edges ever dug into him the way they did me.
“I feel like that too, sometimes. My dad works too much, drinks often, my mom is always stressed. It’s nothing like your situation, or Caiden’s, but it weighs me down some days.” Dante leaned back on the bench, his head turned sideways to look at me.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
He shrugged, as if it wasn’t a big deal. “I get through it, I tell myself that it could be worse.”
I wanted to believe him.
But my anger wouldn’t grant me peace; it hungered, gnawed, begged for someone to blame.
“Maybe I should just stoop down to Caiden’s level next time,” I said. The words surprised us both.
“I wouldn’t blame you,” he said. “But you’re not like him.”
Wasn’t I? I could feel it deep in my marrow, that sickness, that generational rot.
Maybe I was just another version of my mother, bottling up poison until it overflew and scorched everything in its path.
I stared at the raw crescents my nails had left on my palm, thinking I should cut them short, before they hurt someone else.
Dante’s hand hovered, hesitant, then landed on mine.
