“We are so not concentric, Blake.”
I chuckled at her art terms. “Concentric?”
“A common center. We don’t share that at all.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’m afraid of everything. The things I know, the things I don’t know.”
“Tell me, what terrifies you? The things you know.”
She took a deep breath. “You?”
“I terrify you.” Well, she wasn’t wrong. She did not know the beast that was lingering inside of me.
“Yes, you. I have known you for about three days, and I can’t seem to escape you, whether or not you are with me.” She shut her eyes. She slipped up a lot.
“You think a lot about me?”
“Come on. All the girls think about you. The last time I checked, I was a girl. What terrifies me is that I seem to be the focal point of your attention.”
“Why?”
“Because in less than three months, I won’t be here, and I will never see you again.”
“You believe that?”
“It’s been my life for the past fifteen years.”
“So, you don’t think I would keep in touch?”
“It’s not the same, and you know that.”
I remembered what my dad told me about my looks. “And that terrifies you?”
“Yes, it does. I’m not good at saying goodbye. It’s one reason I do not make friends. It’s hard on me.”
Silence lingered.
“So as much as I enjoyed this, just stop, please. Leave me alone because I do not think it’s easy to say goodbye to someone like you.”
She got up and put her backpack over her shoulder.
I couldn’t get up or follow her. I couldn’t even tell her to stop. It was as if an invisible force held me in place and locked my lips.
No, this cannot be happening.
8
ELENA
Blake didn’t follow, and I did not know how to feel about that. I already regretted that I’d ask him to stop with whatever he was doing.
Maybe it finally sunk in how hard my life was. If he knew Herbert Watkins, he would think twice. My dad made everything unbearable with friends and outsiders.
What he told me in the woods, about my life needing saving, weighed down my thoughts. I never thought about it like that.
My father might be paranoid, but I knew I was his. Still, wondering about that now was going to weigh constantly on my mind, too. What if he had kidnapped me and us moving had to do with someone on our heels, like my birthparents.
