• • •
And then —
I hear it.
A name.
“Abby.”
My stomach drops.
Who the fuck is Abby?
I keep my face neutral.
Play it cool.
Don’t let on that it bothers me.
“So who the fuck is Abby?”
“Ro, no cursing,” my mom says immediately.
“Sorry, Mom.”
But I’m still staring at him.
Waiting.
He shrugs like it’s nothing.
“Just someone I met. She’s in my history class. We got seated together.”
Just someone.
Right.
I nod slowly.
“Oh. Cool. Cool.”
I’m already planning her funeral.
Nothing fancy. Just the basic arrangements.
• • •
He keeps talking.
Now I’m actually listening.
Red hair. Green eyes. She jumped the fence with him to ditch last period, he says, grinning. They’d sprinted three blocks before she started laughing so hard she couldn’t run anymore. He’d had to drag her the rest of the way.
I watch his face while he tells it.
The way it opens up when he talks about her.
Something easy in his expression that I recognize — it’s how he looks on the roof. How he looked with his hand in mine.
