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“After. In the parking lot. You were waiting for a ride.” I don’t want to say the rest. I say it anyway. “He said you were pretty. And then he said something about your shoes.”

She doesn’t move. I watch her not move.

“What about my shoes?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Rafe.”

“That they were cheap,” I say. “That you were—that you were in the wrong place. It was a stupid thing to say. He says stupid things like that all the time.”

She looks down at the blanket. She doesn’t say anything for a while.

“So why did that matter to you?” she says finally. “What your dad said.”

And I don’t have it. I sit there and look for it, and there’s nothing in my hand.

“I don’t know,” I say.

She waits.

“I’d already noticed you,” I say. “Before that. I didn’t want to. And then he did, too, and it—” I stop. I don’t know how the sentence ends. “I didn’t like it.”

She looks at me. And I know what that sounds like. I know exactly what it sounds like, the version from every movie, where the boy is mean to the girl because he likes her and it’s all some big misunderstanding.

I’m not going to sit here with her neck like that and let her think I secretly fucking liked her. Because I didn’t.

“It wasn’t like that,” I say. “It wasn’t—I didn’t have a crush on you, Tessa. I didn’t like you at all. I didn’t like being around you. You were just—there. All the time. And I got mean about it.”

She’s very still.

“Why me, though?” she says. “You could’ve been a dick to anybody.”

I sit with it. There’s something there. I can feel the edges of it. I can’t pick it up.

“Because you let me,” I say.

And I hear it. The second it’s out.

“No,” I say. “That’s not—no.”

I put my good hand over my face. I take it away.

“I thought you were letting me,” I say. “You never said anything back. You didn’t fight. You just put your eyes down and took it, and I thought—I don’t know. I thought that meant it didn’t matter that much. To you. I thought you were weak.”

I look at her neck. I can’t help it.

“I was wrong,” I say.

She doesn’t say anything.

“I was a dick,” I admit. “I knew you didn’t like it. I kept doing it anyway.”

That’s all I have. I look for more, and there isn’t any more. Not anything I could hand her that would be true.

She looks at me for a long time.

She doesn’t say it’s okay. She doesn’t say anything soft.