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I laughed. “You want me to walk you back when you’re done with the hot chocolate? Tonight’s storm will probably pass in an hour or so.”
She didn’t answer that. “Do you have a first aid kit?”
“Yeah.” I pulled it from under my bed and handed it to her.
She pulled out a few Band-Aids and cotton balls, and I glanced down at her arm. There were five thin red lines, and they were still bleeding.
“Did you cut yourself on my window?” I asked.
“No,” she said, looking down. “I did these myself...”
I glanced at her other arm and noticed three similar lines had healed.
“Wait.” I took the cotton balls from her hand. “That’s not the right way to fix these.”
I took out the antiseptic spray and aloe-vera cream. Then I motioned for her to give me her hand.
She obliged, and I took my time addressing each of her cuts, holding myself back from asking why she was doing this to herself.
When I finished, I put the kit away and noticed the rain was slowing to a drizzle. "Do you want me to walk you back when it completely stops?"
“It’s too dark to walk back.”
“It’s only four blocks over.”
“Can I just stay in Jonathan’s bed tonight?” she asked, getting into his bed before I was able to answer. “I have nightmares the more I sleep at my foster house anyway.”
“Nightmares about what?”
She shook her head and slipped under the covers. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay, then.” I tossed her a pillow, confused as to how she’d gone from looking for Jonathan to wanting to spend the night.
"I can't call the foster agency again, Corey," she said, several minutes later. "This is my sixth family, so even though Jonathan isn't here anymore and I hate this family the most, I'm going to try not to leave the house at night so much."
She said the words as if she meant them, but it took me three days to realize that she didn’t. She came over almost every night—throwing rocks at my window, burying herself under a pile of blankets on Jonathan’s bed, and making false promises that she wouldn’t do it the next day.
I teased her sometimes and told her she was a "big ass baby," made her cry once or twice by making her wait for a little too long outside, but I never admitted that I enjoyed her company. That I enjoyed our lengthy Scrabble matches and arguments about who was smarter. (Me, always.)
And I definitely never revealed that even though her brother and I had promised to combine our talents in tech someday and “take over the world,” Hayley was the one who became my first true best friend. Not Jonathan.
