Page 27

“You don’t have to say anything tonight.”

A breath of a laugh escapes me. Every other sentence out of him is I know, and if he knows all of this, I don’t understand how we’re standing here.

Then, all at once, I’m so tired my knees want to fold. It’s heavier than sleepy. It’s in my arms and legs and the backs of my eyes, and it’s the stairwell too, the five minutes I spent crying on a step before I ever came down here. I sit on the low concrete ledge that runs along the walkway, and the cold goes straight through my jeans.

After a second, Evan sits too, with a foot of concrete between us. I look at that foot of concrete, and then I look away. My shoulders have been up by my ears since I came downstairs, and I make them drop.

Beside me, Evan is picking at something on his pants.

I look at the sidewalk. “Did you like her?”

The picking stops. I wish I could take it back, not because I don’t want to know, but because I want to know so badly I can feel it in my chest.

“I don’t know.”

“That means yes.”

“No. It means I don’t know.”

“You kissed her.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“Okay.”

He stops. There’s a crack running through the sidewalk between my shoes, and a line of ants following it, one after another after another, and I watch them for a long time.

“I liked that she liked me,” he says.

It’s barely above a breath, and it goes right through me. I turn my head, and he isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at his hands, and his face is miserable and open in a way I haven’t seen in a long time. For once, I don’t go after the wording. I sit there, because I get it, and I hate that I get it. Some small, awful part of me knows exactly what he means, and I can’t even be angry about that part, because it’s the truest thing he’s said all night.

“You could’ve told me something was wrong.”

“I should have.”

“Was something wrong?”

“With us?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

He doesn’t hesitate, and it isn’t defensive. It’s just sure, and that’s the one that nearly breaks me. If we’d been fighting all summer, if he’d been pulling away, if there’d been anything I could put my finger on, I could put this somewhere. I could look at the crack and say, there, that’s where it got in.

Evan shakes his head. “No. That’s the fucked-up part. Nothing was wrong.”

I swallow. It takes two tries. “Okay.”

“Kylie—”

“I need you to go. Please.”

He nods, and we stand up. For one insane second, I think he’s going to hug me. I see it start, his arm lifting, his weight shifting toward me. Then he catches it, and his arm drops back to his side, and my body notices. It leans an inch toward where he would have been, and I lock my knees.

“Can I call you?” he asks.

“I don’t know.”