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And ran straight into Harry. “Whoa, where’s the fire?” he asked, his voice so light and happy, and it made everything in me shrivel up. I saw the tattoo then, and instead of seeing it as elegant lines, I saw it as rebellion—a sixteen-year-old breaking the rules. No, not just rule breaking. Doing somethingillegal.
As he watched me, looked into my eyes, his expression fell. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t touch me.” I tried to keep my voice firm, but it came out gasping, a whisper that could’ve been lost over the roaring of blood in my ears. And my world turned once more as I pushed away from him, heading down the hallway toward the way we all entered.
“Stella!” he called, and a second later he stood in front of me, blue eyes wide. “Wait, wait, what happened? What’s going on?”
“Did you go to juvie?” The words were loud, ugly. That gasping whisper turned into something stronger, but it also wavered more. “Do you have a probation officer?”
Harry froze. Every part of him. “W-Who said that?”
It didn’t feel like I was breathing.
“Did you rob a gas station?” I recoiled from him, and I could feel my face screw up. “Two?”
Harry’s chest rose and fell rapidly as he stared at me, lips parted, a deep crease between his brows. Gone was the euphoric expression he had while onstage, as if it had never been there to begin with.
I clenched both hands into fists at my sides. Everything pinched in me, my chest, my stomach, my throat. “Tell me you didn’t.”
Please, I wanted to add, and my thoughts were desperate.Please say you didn’t. That you couldnever. You would never do anything so horrible. My mother wasn’t right about you. Just tell me you’re a good person.
His voice came out rough when he responded, unwittingly replying to my thoughts too. “I can’t.”
I stared at him, but it wasn’t him. The red hair, the white shirt, the freckles along his cheekbones, the tattoo—it was all the same, but it wasn’t. I stood in the hallway with a stranger. He looked a lot like Harry, but wasn’t.
Feeling sick to my stomach, I shoved past him, not caring that my shoulder jarred into him. I needed to get outside, to take in a breath of fresh air before I suffocated.
“I can explain,” he told me, voice growing in frantic fervor as he caught up with me. “There’s—there wasso muchthat went into it, and I—”
“You lied.” My voice sounded angrier than I felt. Instead, there was merely an expanding balloon in my chest. Some sort of dark emotion filled it, but it hadn’t burst yet, hadn’t swallowed me whole. “You lied to me.”
“I didn’t,” he insisted, the desperation clear and enough to cause the balloon to swell wider. I shoved out of the VIP hallway, nearly stumbling into the guard standing post. “Stella, please, I—”
Whatever Harry said next got swallowed by the bass dropping from the track the band played, and for a moment the pulsing lights blinded me.Get outside, I told myself, forcing my footsteps straight.Breathe.
And there it was, the rectangle beacon that I aimed for. I shoved outside, into the coolness of the night air. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t freeze the searing tension that gripped my insides.
“Wait,” Harry pleaded. “Please, okay—let me explain—”
“Explain? Harry, you had agun!” My voice echoed in the night, and I backed away from him, almost afraid to stand too close. People around us stopped to stare at the spectacle we were creating—Iwas creating—but I was beyond caring.
Harry, a gun in his hand. Harry, bandana over his face. Harry, tattoo of a hand clutching his neck. The image made my stomach turn and my head feel light, like I was on the verge of passing out.
Harry looked like a deer caught in headlights, too afraid to move. “It…it wasn’t a real one.”
Last night at Crushed Beanz, he’d said the same thing.They weren’t real guns. Just toys. He’d been talking about Terry. When I asked him what was weighing on his mind, he told me about Terry. It was easy now to see what he was really trying to say.
“I was stupid then,” he said, taking a step closer to me, holding out a shaking hand as if to sayPlease, hear me out. “I—I didn’t know—”
“It was a year ago, Harry!” A year ago, a year ago. Three hundred and sixty-five flipping days. “A person can’t change that much in one year.”
My words still echoed in my ears from last night.How good can you be if you rob a gas station?How could he do something like that? It changed the entire way I looked at him. It changedeverything.
“Destelle.” Harry took another step closer, causing me to take a large jump back, maintaining the distance.
“Don’t…don’t touch me.”
His expression faltered as he looked at me, no doubt reading the fear on my face. “You know me. I’d never hurt you.”
