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I’m not.

I’ve never been a quiet person, and everything that’s happened to me in the last year has driven whatever quietness remained right out of me.

I wish I had a microphone for this. A sound system and a crowd of a thousand.

I wish everyone in the world could hear.

“I love you.”

That’s the first thing I have to say to West Leavitt, and I hear his surprise in the sharp sound of his inhale.

“I came here because I love you, and I helped you the best I could because I love you. I need you to know that there isn’t anything I wouldn’t have done to make this work between us. I didn’t know it when I got here, but I sure as fuck know it now. If you’d asked me to take time off school, move out here, help you get your sister on the right path, I would’ve done it. For you. If you’d said to me you wanted to raise her, you and me together, take her from your mom and set up a house somewhere, I’d have said sure, yeah, let’s do it, even though it’s scary. For you I’d do it. All I’ve ever said to you is yes, and I was going to keep saying yes, because you were worth it. The way you made me feel. Your mind and your heart and you. Everything about being with you was worth it.”

His eyes are on the road, so I look at it, too, but there’s nothing there.

“Look at me,” I say.

He won’t.

“You look at me,” I repeat. “I deserve that much from you.”

The truck slows. He signals, then pulls onto the side. Cuts the engine.

He turns toward me, and it’s harder.

But it’s already so hard, there’s no point in flinching away from it now.

“You have to leave Silt,” I tell him. “Take your sister, because God knows you won’t leave her, but you cannot stay. You’ll never be happy here. You don’t know how.”

His eyes cut away from me. Out the window, toward the mountains.

“You told me once when I needed to hear it that I hadn’t done anything wrong, so now I’m going to tell you. You did do something wrong. That performance last night? It was a performance. I’m not going to pretend it was anything you wanted, that you got carried away with lust or some bullshit, because that was fucking calculated. It was mean, and it was wrong. But I know what you did, West. I know why you did it. And the same way I needed to hear that I hadn’t done anything wrong with Nate, that I wasn’t wrong even when a hundred strange assholes on the Internet were talking in my head at me day in and day out—”

His eyes cut to me.

“I never told you that?” I ask. “Yeah. Voices in my head, insomnia, misery. The whole thing. And you were the one who pulled me out of that. You were.”

“You did it yourself.”

“Everyone does everything themselves, West. By themselves, to themselves. Everyone. But sometimes they do it because they have a reason, and you were my reason. You told me I was fine, I wasn’t broken, I wasn’t wrong, and I believed you. You made a difference.”

I knot my hands in my lap. Not sure now that I should be saying any of this.

Never sure, actually, that I could make any kind of difference for him the way he did for me.

“I’m not the person you need to hear it from, I guess.”

There’s a plane low in the sky. Landing at the airport. I look at his face again. “But I might be the only person who’s going to tell you. Your dad sucked. Your family … well, nobody wants to hear anything bad about their family, but West, they’re never going to stop taking things from you. Not ever. There’s never going to be a day when you look around at your mom and your sister and your grandma and say, Okay, they’re fine. I can go live my life the way I want now. It’s not going to happen, any more than I’m ever going to get my sex pictures off the Internet. You can’t wait for it to happen. What you have to do is find a way to get out from under it, knowing it’s never going away. You have to make your own life, because if you don’t, you just won’t get to have one at all, and that’s the worst fucking thing I can imagine.”

He makes a sound in his throat. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know how he feels, but this is the only chance I’ll get. I’m going to lay it all down in front of him, because he taught me how to cut through the bullshit, and it’s one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned.

“You know, that’s the thing that made me cry the hardest last night, even after what you did to me? Even with how mad I am, how fucking gross I feel every time I even look at your mouth or think about hearing what I heard—thinking about how you made me hear it—it’s even worse to think I’m going to leave and you’re going to drive back to Silt and die there. Die there every day.”

I swipe at my face. Mascara all over my hand. What a disaster.

“It’s sick, you know that?” I say. “This heart of mine, limping along?”

“I don’t get it,” he says. “I don’t get why you’re being …”

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