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“So, go to the party and tell her.”
“I just said—”
“You gotta fight, man,” I said. Practically shouted. Visions of my mom, bloody and motionless on the kitchen floor came at me out of nowhere. And me, crawling across the blood-smeared linoleum to help her. But I was too late.
“You fight,” I said, “because if you don’t, it’ll be too late. And too late is fucking death.”
Miller stared, shocked. I looked away and forced my hands to unclench, waiting for him to tell me to take my crazy shit and get the fuck out.
But he didn’t.
“She needs me to be her friend,” he said after a minute. “She needs…me.”
“So you’re her pack mule. You carry all her shit and try to make life easier on her because you care about her. What about you?”
Miller started to answer but then grew quiet. Thinking. Finally, he put his guitar back in its case and stood up.
“You want to come?” he asked. “I mean, it’s probably going to be a bunch of drunk jocks playing beer pong to shit music.”
“I’m coming,” I said, kicking sand over the fire. “I told you. I got your back.”
“Why?”
I stared. After everything he knew about me, he wanted to know why I bothered to hang out with him.
“You don’t annoy the living shit out of me,” I said gruffly. “Good enough?”
He grinned. “Good enough.”
I turned to grab my jacket so he couldn’t see my face.
The party was just what Miller had said it would be. Chance Blaylock, the center for the football team, invited half the school to his place at the start of every year. His team was wasted and playing beer pong in the kitchen while a sound system blasted popular music all over the huge house. We pushed through a crowd of dancers, Miller searching for Violet among the faces in the dark.
I realized I was searching the crowds for a face too.
Leave her alone.
We made it to the patio outside where lights were strung up. The crowd was thinner; people were talking and drinking in smaller groups by the pool.
“I don’t see her,” Miller said, taking a seat on a lounger. “This was a stupid idea.”
I caught a flash of a red dress in the kitchen and nodded my head. “There.”
Miller looked, and the way his entire face softened to see Violet made me lower my gaze. Like I shouldn’t be seeing something so private. Or unfamiliar.
He heaved a sigh. “Here goes nothing. Watch my guitar?”
“Yep.”
Miller made for the kitchen and I glanced around in search of beer. A cooler was set up by the pool, green necks poking up from hunks of white ice. I grabbed Miller’s case and headed over, but a guy drunkenly stumbled there first. He grabbed a beer, then blinked up at me stupidly.
“Holy shit, are you the bouncer?” He cackled in my face. “Hey, look! Blaylock hired a bouncer.”
“Fuck off.”
“But for real,” the guy slurred. “Did you escape from jail or what? I heard—”
I took the beer bottle out
