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She squawked in outrage when they all tackled her and landed in a pile on the bleachers. They stayed there in the warm spring sun, holding onto each other.
Eventually, Nick looked at his friends and said, “We’re alone in this.”
Gibby glanced over at him, her head in Seth’s lap, her feet on Jazz’s legs, the toe of one of her boots pressed against Nick’s thigh. “What do you mean?”
Nick shrugged. “Everything that’s coming—we can only trust in ourselves and each other. We don’t have the cops. We don’t have a lot of the people. It feels like everyone is against us.”
Gibby sat up, leaning against Seth, who wrapped an arm around her shoulders as she drew her knees to her chest. “Bullshit.”
Nick blinked. “What?”
“That’s bullshit,” she repeated. “It was never going to be easy. But I promise you there are so many more of us than there are of them. Screw those people. Screw the cops.Weknow what we are, and what we’re capable of.”
“She’s right,” Jazz said as she patted Gibby’s arm. “It may feel like we’re alone right now, but it won’t always be that way, so long as we remember what we’re fighting for. And maybe that puts a weight on us that we didn’t ask for, but I know us.” She looked at each of them in turn. “I know we can build the world we want to live in. It’s up to us to see that through.”
“We can,” Seth agreed, “and we will.” He smiled at Nick. “We owe it to each other and to ourselves.”
Paths diverged, Nick knew. What was true one day might not be true the next. And yet, when he looked at his friends, he thoughtthey had a point. While he didn’t want to think about the possibility of one day not having these wonderful people in his life, he would never forget what they’d taught him. Maybe that was the point of all of this—to make the most of everything with the time they had. And if there was one thing he’d learned in his short, dramatic life, it was to never let things go unsaid. You never knew when it might be the last time.
“I love you guys,” he said quietly. “More than you know.”
“Ditto,” Seth said.
“Ditto twice,” Gibby said.
“Ditto three times,” Jazz said, and Nick laughed until he could barely breathe.
Dad!” Nick called when he walked into the house. “You home?”
“Upstairs!” Dad said from somewhere above him. “All right?”
“Yeah! Gonna get changed so we can go. Gibby said to remind you that I’m not allowed near the grill because she likes my eyebrows as they are.”
Dad appeared at the top of the stairs. “Noted. But if Seth hasn’t already burned them off when you two were grinding on each other, I think you’ll be all right.”
“Dad!”
Dad rolled his eyes. “What? It’s not my fault you two were on the couch like that when I got home.”
Nick scowled at him. “You didn’t have to put plastic on the couch. That was overkill.”
“Boy stains,” Dad reminded him.
Nick threw up his hands. “Whatever. Keep on making my life miserable, why don’t you.”
“I’m funny,” Dad said.
“That is a flat-outlie. There’s nothing funny about you!”
Dad crossed his arms. “I made you, didn’t I?”
Nick was startled into laughter, though he tried to cover it up. It didn’t go well. It sounded like he was trying to hack up a lung. Dad looked too smug for his own good.
“Mail for you,” he said, turning back around, heading toward his room. “Left it on the kitchen table. Package was delivered earlier. I swear to god, if it’s a sex toy, you better not have used my credit card. I’m all for expressing yourself, but I don’t need to know if you bought something to be inserted into someone else.”
Nick screeched in outrage. Howdarehis father suggest something so … so … huh. Sex toys. Nick had never thought of that before. Did Seth want a sex toy? Maybe they could—
He blushed furiously. One thing at a time. They needed to havesexfirst before considering silicone assistance.
