I look up. “That sounds exhausting. What about the mountain?”
“Somewhere I had to cross to reach a better place.”
The weight of the comment sinks through me without even knowing the whole story. “And the coordinates?”
He goes still for a moment, not frozen, just quieter in himself. “Where I was standing when I decided I was done being someone else’s property.”
My breath catches. There’s a split second where I forget the noise around us—the crowd, the music, the torches, all of it. It’s just him and that sentence and the cold little echo it leaves behind.
He pulls his arm back again, telling me without words that those are all the pieces of him I get for now.
“That’s not small,” I say quietly.
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
I turn my cup slowly between my hands, watching the condensation gather and slide over my fingers. Around us, the luau keeps opening wider into the night, torchlight deepening,laughter rising, music warming up somewhere beyond the stage. But I’m stuck on his words and the hard, controlled way he said them, on the picture they leave behind. A place. A decision. A line he crossed and never went back over.
“I get it,” I say. “The past being a thing you carry whether you invited it along or not.”
North reaches across the table and lays his hand over mine again. Heat flashes through me so quickly it feels mean. His hand is big, rougher than it looks, and the weight of it settles me and rattles me at the same time.
Then his grip tightens slightly, just enough to turn my hand over in his.
My breath catches, because there it is. The scar, faint now, pale against my skin, easy to miss unless someone’s actually looking.
North stares at it for one quiet second, then lifts his eyes to mine.
“Did someone hurt you?”
No circling or soft lead-in, just the question. My first thought is of Daniel, but I know he’s talking about the cut running up my inner wrist.
The past rolls toward me so suddenly that it doesn’t feel like memory at all but as though somebody else’s life is brushing past. A locker slamming, girls laughing. Chris with blood on his knuckles. The smell of bleach and dust in the dark.
I should pull my hand back, make a joke, point us neatly back toward cocktails and torches and anything that isn’t this.
Instead, I meet North’s stare, and the way he’s watching me, steady and unflinching, makes the truth feel a lot closer than I want it to be.
“Not just one person,” I say, and my voice already sounds wrong to my own ears. Thinner and less defensive. “School.”
North doesn’t interrupt. His thumb drags once, slow and grounding, over the inside of my wrist.
“I was bullied,” I say and try to smile, but it feels forced. “Pretty badly. For years.” I attempt to laugh this time, but it dies before it gets anywhere. “No real reason. I talked too much. I was awkward. Easy target, I guess.”
The words come out flat at first, the version I’ve told myself often enough that it almost sounds harmless. Then the rest of it starts pushing up behind them.
“Chris, my brother, and Clio, my best friend, stepped in when they could,” I say, staring at our hands because looking at him now feels too exposing. “He got into fights over me more than once. But before that…” I swallow. “It was mostly just me trying to stay out of their way and failing.”
North’s hand tightens slightly around mine, enough to tell me to keep going.
“There was one night,” I say, and now my voice is quieter, rougher, “when they locked me in a supply closet after school. I was there until the next morning. A janitor found me.”
Saying it out loud pulls me straight back into it. The dark, the panic. My throat giving out from screaming. My knees tucked to my chest while everyone else went home and ate dinner and slept and lived their lives.
I can feel the shape of that fear clinging to me even now.
“There was a video too,” I say. “Me using the bathroom. I didn’t know anyone was filming. It got passed around the school, and after that…” My mouth goes dry. “After that, I stopped feeling like a person there. I was just the thing they laughed at.”
The table in front of me blurs for a second, and I blink hard and hate myself a little for it.
