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It was obvious that this was no accident. Someone had done this to him.

Someone had hurt him this badly and left him here like garbage, left him bleeding and broken and unconscious, and I had been asleep in my cabin dreaming about goddamn gummy bears, while the worst thing in the world took place just a hundred yards away.

That realization made me sick. Physically. Metaphorically. Philosophically.

I bent down and scooped him into my arms. Careful to support his head and his neck because I’d seen enough movies and watched enough camp-mandated first aid videos to know that you weren’t supposed to move people this hurt. But I also refused to leave him out here while I went and grabbed a phone. I was never leaving his side again.

It was a promise I was making myself. And to him if he ever…

I shook my head. When he woke up.

“Come on,” I said. “Come on, come on, come on. We’re almost there. You’re gonna be okay. You’re gonna be fine. Everything’s gonna be…”

I couldn’t finish the lie. It got stuck in my throat and stayed there. So instead of saying anything more, I started moving towards the cabins while the weight of him against me cracked something open in my chest that I didn’t know how to close again.

By the time we got to the clearing in front of the first row of counselor cabins, I was sobbing. Giant, ugly, gasping sobs that made it hard to see, hard to breathe, hard to do anything except hold on to him and keep moving. I was screaming too, calling out for help, yelling into the darkness as if my voice alone could conjure medical equipment and ambulances and all the things that might fix this.

Cabin lights started flicking on, one after the other. Figures emerged from doorways, shouting, moving towards us. Mason was running. Cindy was on a phone.

But none of that mattered anymore.

What mattered was Alvin. What mattered was the fact that as I clutched him to my chest, feeling his broken body against mine, I finally understood what he meant to me.

He was everything. Just like I’d told him that night in our cabin. He was the thing I’d been reaching for without admitting it. He was the only part of me that made sense. He was funny and dangerous and brilliant and impossible, and I loved him with a ferocity that had been building since the day he climbed into my window.

And some sick fuck out there was trying to take him away from me. For good.

“Help!” I screamed into the chaos of sirens and voices and questioning stares. “Somebody help him! Help him! Help him!”

My arms were shaking, my entire body burning up with the need to protect him, to fix him, to go back in time and change everything so that this moment never existed. But I couldn’t do any of those things. All I could do was hold him and feel him and finally, fucking finally admit what I’d known for years but had been too scared to say.

I loved him. I loved the beautiful boy next door. And now I was terrified I was going to lose him.

CHAPTER 38

“How is he?” I grabbed onto the ledge of the counter and leaned as close to the glass as I could get without going through it, my backpack strap hiked up on a shoulder while I did my best not to act like my skin was crawling.

“How is who, sir?” The woman in the blue scrubs glanced up from her computer screen and glared at where my hands were tapping nervously. She’d just replaced the guy who’d been sitting there when I came in a few hours ago.

They wouldn’t let me go with Alvin last night. So I was forced to wait until I could get a ride out of camp on one of the transfer vans.

I’d stepped away until the first guy disappeared behind the double doors, then attempted to approach the counter again. The fucker wouldn’t tell me shit. Said it was a matter of patient privacy. Family only.

I never understood that. Why who you were born around was always more important than the people you chose to be around. My ma knew who I wanted her to know. The polished version of me. The captain of the swim team, the guy on a full athletic scholarship to a school we could never afford on a single-parent’s salary, the homecoming king who dated the kind of girls who wouldn’t have looked at me twice if they knew where I’d come from. The picture-perfect son every mother would want.

Not the freak of nature I was hiding. Not the self-hatred. Not the guy who got a peek of his best friend’s dick when they were fourteen and hadn’t stopped thinking about it since.

Alvy knew my secret. He knew and he accepted me. Like his family never accepted him. That was the difference between us, though. He had never cared. I never quite figured out how not to…

I pulled my hands off the counter, tucked them into my jacket pockets, and offered the woman an apologetic shrug. “Sorry… Alvin Carter. Can you tell me what room he’s in? They brought him in last night and I haven’t heard shit since.”

She clicked on her keyboard a couple more times, clearly not sensing the urgency. “Are you family?”

“I’m… yeah…” I nodded once and swallowed hard, afraid the truth would come back up with whatever I’d eaten for dinner last night. Had I eaten last night? I couldn’t remember. There was definitely something heavy sitting in the pit of my stomach but I wasn’t sure it was food anymore.

Regret, shame, guilt? For sure one of those.

The nurse peered over the top of her computer screen, eyeing me up and down like she didn’t believe me. She was right not to. I wasn’t his family. Not in the way most people thought of it. We didn’t share the same blood. But that shouldn’t have mattered. We shared something more. We were closer than two people ought to be. At least we were, before I went and screwed that all up…