I looked up into the face of Caiden Baxter. I knew him the way you know the shape of the moon on a cloudy night: always there, sometimes hidden, always something a little dangerous around the edges.
He was in my class but never talked much, unless it was to correct a teacher or startle the other kids.
His hair looked like it had been hacked off with kitchen scissors, and there was a bruise, fresh and purple, blossoming just below his left eye.
“I’m fine,” I said, and I tried to stand up without making a face, but my knee had split open just enough to draw blood.
I stared at it, hypnotized by the bright welling red, and for a second I thought about how my mother hated the sight of blood, how she’d fainted when I lost my first tooth and came running with it in my fist.
Caiden crouched beside me, knees to his chest like a grasshopper. “That guy’s a jerk,” he said. “You want me to trip him tomorrow? I tripped a teacher once, by accident.”
The idea made me laugh, which hurt more than the scrape. “I’ll live,” I said, and reached for my backpack, but Caiden beat me to it. He held it by one strap, careful, like it was a baby bird or some other breakable thing. His fingers were all scabbed over, and I remembered hearing he’d punched a window once when his dad locked him out of the house.
“You got a Band-Aid?” he asked, like it was the most important thing in the world.
I shook my head. He set my bag down and rummaged in his own. It was a plain black backpack, way too big for him, like he could crawl inside and zip it up if he wanted to disappear. He pulled out a crumpled sandwich bag with two Band-Aids inside. One shaped like a dinosaur. “You want the T-Rex?” he said, holding it up between us.
“Yeah.”
He peeled the paper and stuck it over my knee, hands steady and gentle. “You know,” he said, not looking up, “if you squeeze the skin real hard, it stops the bleeding faster.”
I tried it. He was right.
We walked the rest of the way together, not talking much. I liked the way we didn’t have to.
The other kids swarmed around us in packs, hollering and shoving, but we moved like ghosts—untouched, unnoticed, except for the trail of bloody sneaker prints I left behind.
We filed inside the classroom, Caiden and I, and he peeled off to his assigned seat, cramming himself into the seat so he could wedge his knees against the book rack.
I sat closer to the window, where I could see the frost ghosting across the glass and the playground beyond, already scuffed to dirt by the first recess crew.
The teacher was writing something on the board, her handwriting swoopy and wide, like she was always trying to make things prettier than they really were.
I kept sneaking glances at Caiden. It wasn’t that I liked him, not like that. I just didn’t want him to vanish, to become another one of those people who only existed in the holes they left behind.
Lillian used to say Pathosbury was full of ghosts, but I thought it was more full of leftovers. The kids who didn’t have anywhere better to go, who walked to school with their heads down and learned to laugh at the wrong things.
At lunch, I picked at the edges of my peanut butter sandwich until the bread turned see-through from my fingers.
The sandwich tasted mostly like sadness and a little bit like refrigerator.
Caiden found me there, or maybe he’d been following, quiet and deliberate. He stood to the side, watching his shoes, shifting from foot to foot like he was waiting to be let in on a secret.
The bruise on his face had started to turn yellow at the edges, seeping under his skin like watercolor.
“Hey,” he said. “Do you want to trade?” He held out his own sandwich: bologna drowning in mayonnaise, cut into uneven triangles.
I shook my head. I hated mayonnaise, but that wasn’t the reason.
“I already licked mine,” I said, which was true, but really I just wanted to keep something that was mine for once.
He shrugged and sat down next to me, close enough that our knees almost touched. I tried not to think about it, but it made my stomach go jittery in a way I didn’t have words for yet.
Caiden picked at the seams of his jeans, winding a frayed thread around his finger till the tip went pinkish-white. “My dad says if you’re not tough, people walk on you forever.” He watched the playground, not me. “But I think maybe he’s wrong.”
I didn’t have anything smart to say to that. My dad used to say,There are three types of people in this world, Amelia: the ones who build, the ones who break, and the ones who run.He’d never said which one I was.
Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe that’s why he left.
