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He snaps his gaze to me, and I shrug, lips twisted with a small, rueful smile.
He huffs a not-quite laugh, but it’s something. And for a moment, it feels just like how it used to be, with humor alighting his eyes, humor I feel reflected in my chest, easing up some of that tension eating away with it.
And then I remember.
Without any prompting.
Because how could I forget?
How could either of us ever forget?
It hits him at just about the same time it hits me, and both of our barely-there smiles fade.
Clearing my throat, I stuff my hands in my pockets and look around. In the corner of my eye, Jeremy’s started toeing at the mulch again, pale fingers squeezed around the chains.
“Why’d you leave?” I find myself asking, still looking anywhere but directly at him.
He shrugs. “Because coming here was fucking stupid.”
“Yeah…”
“I don’t just mean—” He quickly cuts himself off, and I frown.
Blowing out a sharp breath, he finally says in a more careful, measured, tight voice, “I don’t belong here. I feel like I…”
“Like you what?”
“Like because she couldn’t be here, I had to take her place.”
Everything in me stills, and a weird sort of pressure fills my ears.
“Sorry,” he mutters.
I go to say, Don’t be, but he keeps going before I can manage to scrape out the word.
“It’s just being in this school again, walking these halls…I don’t fucking belong here, and everyone knows it. She should be here. With you. With Waylon. With her friends.” He’s shaking his head, and when I’m finally able to drag my gaze to his face, something sort of bottoms out inside me at the unchecked pain rippling across his face.
It’s been eight months, and other than flickers here and there, sometimes I feel like he’s as much a ghost as is the girl who haunts us both.
Not that she even is a ghost.
She’s still alive.
She has to be. Jeremy would know if she wasn’t. I would know.
She’s fucking alive out there, somewhere, clinging to the memories of us and home, just as desperately as we cling to her and the hope that she’ll be returned to us.
Still…despite Jeremy’s insistence she’s alive, sometimes I do wonder.
I doubt.
He wouldn’t lie to me…right?
Except he would, wouldn’t he? When it comes to this…
Groaning, he slaps his hands to his face, and scrubs roughly. He says something I can’t make out, and I find myself drawing nearer.
Despite what he said a moment ago, I feel like there’s something else going on here. Something else eating him, that isn’t just the absolute absurdity that is going to prom while his sister—my girlfriend—is missing, and-and going through God fucking knows what.
