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“Hey, Jax?”
“Yes, Kennedy?”
“You want to be my best friend?”
He scrunched up his nose. “You don’t just ask people to be your best friend. That’s not how people get best friends.”
“Oh.” I frowned and scratched at my tangled hair. “Well, how do people get best friends?”
“I don’t know. It just kind of happens.”
“Oh.” I pulled out my roll and began feeding the birds as they dived down like addicts. “Hey, Jax?”
“Yes, Kennedy?”
“Do you just kind of want to happen to be best friends?”
He sighed. “Okay, Kennedy.”
My cheeks heated up and I looked down at the birds chewing up the rolls. “I always wanted a best friend.”
I couldn’t hear him too clearly, because Jax Kilter liked to mumble, but I thought he said the words, “Me too.”
“Now we can be solivagants together,” I said.
“Uh, that cancels out the whole point of solivagant.”
“Shh, Jax. Just let this happen.”
He smiled, and muttered, “Okay.”
12
Kennedy
Present day
Rain,rain, go away, please take Kennedy’s anxiety away.
It rained for two more days, and my body was aching from no sleep. When I tried to close my eyes, I’d see flashes of my past within my eyelids. If I did fall asleep, I’d have nightmares.
Nothing was working. I’d tried every sleeping pill known to mankind. I’d done almost every sleep meditation on the internet, saged my house, taken bubble baths, watchedThe Officeten times over, and still, nothing.
The pounding of the rain on the house was growing more and more intense with each passing day. I had officially been living on Chinese food takeout and pizza delivery. Not my proudest truths, but it was where I was in my journey. On top of the rain, I hadn’t left the house since my panic attack. Honestly, my body had been going through waves of emotional exhaustion. When I’d awaken from my nightmares, I’d be stuck alone with my own hellish thoughts.
I hadn’t known minds could grow so overwhelmed that they could focus on a million things all at once, but mine had managed to do it. Currently, my thoughts consisted of:What am I going to do for a real job? Will I stay in Havenbarrow or move back to the city? Where is Penn? Does he really miss me, or is he just lonely? If he does miss me, why hasn’t he come looking for me?
Because he doesn’t know where you are, Kennedy.
If he really cared, wouldn’t he try to track me down? Wouldn’t he call me instead of just texting?
I also wondered what Jax was up to during the storms. Had he really meant he didn’t want to reconnect? It was hard for me to believe that. I still had so many questions, like how had he bulked up so much from being the skinny boy he was? Why had he stopped writing me? And, most importantly, what had happened to his mother?
Every time I spoke to Yoana, the worry in her voice grew stronger. I sometimes wished she wasn’t so good at reading me—even through a cell phone speaker—but my sister knew the heaviness in my soul was so hard to handle some days.
“I’m okay,” I kept promising her. I felt bad for promising lies, but she was halfway around the world—so there was nothing she could do for me to make everything better. My anxiety and sadness needed to be dealt with by me and only me. No one else could save me.
Well, no one except maybe Joy Jones.
