“A lot happened and I was in a bad place, but I shouldn’t have stopped talking to you.”

She pulls away to look at me. “What happened? Are you okay?”

I think maybe I might be. I mean, I had to have been, even from the beginning, but right now I actually feel it. “Yeah…I’m okay. It’s just…” How do I say it? How do I tell her what I let happen?

“Charlie Rae! Come here for a few minutes! I need your help.”

Something in her dad’s voice tells me he’s calling her for more reasons than needing her.

“I gotta go.” She pulls away.

An urgent need takes me over and I blurt out, “Do you still sneak out?”

She nods.

“Meet me tonight and we’ll talk. Shit…I never said sorry. I wanted to tell you sorry first.”

“Charlie Rae!” her dad calls again.

Charlotte backs up a few steps, turns, and takes a few more. All I can think is she never told me if she would meet me or not. She never said if it was okay.

As though she could read my mind, she stops and glances back. “I…I missed you.”

And then she runs, kicking up sand behind her.

She doesn't hear me say, “I missed you, too.”

“You’re sneaking out with her already? I thought she hated you.” Brandon sits up in his bed and turns on the bedside light.

“Shh. You’ll wake up the house, and that’s not how it is. I just need to talk to her. It’s not like what we saw you doing last summer.”

Brandon’s face pales. I swear to God he’s about to get sick. His mouth drops open and then he lunges off the bed at me.

“What the hell!” I hiss as he grabs my arms.

“Did you tell? What did you see?”

I rip away from him. “You’re tripping the hell out. Like I’m going to tell Mom and Dad you screwed Charlotte’s sister. I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t be here right now if I had.”

He lets out a heavy breath and falls back onto the bed. “I just…” he trails off. “It kind of got out of control. She started talking all serious about her moving with me when she turned eighteen and all this stuff. And it’s just…she’s not… It’s not like I want to hurt her, but it was just so easy with Sadie, ya know? I wanted it to work out. Maybe.”

I look at my brother, not sure where all this opening up is coming from. “You’re seventeen. You don’t have to be serious about anyone. It’s not like—”

“—You don’t get it. You know what? Never mind. I’m tired. I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about.” He turns off the light and gets back into bed like we weren’t just talking about, whatever we were talking about.

“Want me to stay?”

“Shut up. Go get laid,” he replies.

“I’m not sleeping with her, you prick. She’s my friend.”

“Whatever. No one spends as much time together as you two if you’re not going at it, but whatever.”

Ignoring my brother, I open the window and climb out to go meet Charlotte.

I wait off to the side of her house because we weren’t able to decide where to meet. After about twenty minutes, I start to wonder if she either ditched me, or if she went to one of our spots to wait.

Finally I see her sneaking around the building. A smile tugs at my lips. She’s wearing a baseball hat with her hair sticking out the hole. I love how she’s comfortable like that. It makes me miss wearing mine. I don’t know why I don’t anymore.

“Hey,” I whisper.

“Hey,” she replies.

“Where do you want to go?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know… The creek?” The way she looks down, I wonder if she’s blushing, but I don’t want to shine the flashlight in her face to check.

I lead the way; surprised it comes back to me so easily. We twist and turn through the woods until I see the little wooden fort she made with her dad when she was a kid. Those are my favorite things about her. That she does all these cool things. She works harder than any guy I know and she’s just as rough and competitive, but she’s also all girl. Especially in the way she melted against me when I kissed her.

It’s not like Charlotte was my first kiss. I’ve done more than that with Roxi, but I still remember how it felt when my lips touched hers.

I’ve definitely thought about doing it again.

We get to the fort and she leads me around back. The moon is so bright out here that it’s easy to see, especially with our flashlights.

I stop when I see there are two wooden chairs behind the building with a little table between them. I know she said she used to come out here a lot when she was a kid, but I didn’t realize she still did.

“Where’d these come from?”

Charlotte sits in one of the chairs. “It was a project for my dad and I this year. He says he needs to keep busy because he’s getting old and doesn’t want to lose his touch. Which I think is ridiculous. Guest are always coming and going all year around. No one keeps as busy as my dad and—”

“—Charlotte?”

She looks up at me, face awash in moonlight. “Yeah?”

“You’re rambling.” Before I probably would have laughed. Maybe said more to make her laugh, but I don’t. Instead I only sit in the chair next to hers. She pulls her knees up so her feet are flat on the chair, and wraps her arms around her legs. She does that when she’s nervous, like when we sat out here and she told me about her parents and how she wanted to leave.

I guess it’s my time to man up and talk to her, too.

“It wasn’t you.” As soon as the words leave my mouth I know it’s a stupid thing to say.

Charlotte laughs. “Is it one of those it’s not you, it’s me speeches? I didn’t realize those went with friendships, too. Unless you think it’s because we kissed, but it had been months so that doesn’t make sense.”

She rambles more this year than she did last. It’s cute. “It’s not because we kissed. It’s not you that I wanted to stay away from. I was just…having a hard time.”

“And I would have made that harder through emailing? If you didn’t want to talk anymore, that’s fine. I get it. But I deserved at least a kiss off email—”

“—A girl got hurt because of me, all right? She got attacked and could have died and I’m the one who set up the fucking meeting!”

Charlotte goes quiet. The only sound around us is the water in the creek and the rustle of the trees mixed with crickets. Those words were so hard for me to get out. I know it’s stupid. They’re just words, and if I could live through what happened, I could say them, right?

“Nathaniel…”

“Chrissy was Roxi’s best friend. She was my best friend, Adam’s girlfriend. He’d been acting kind of different, and not in a good way, but I didn’t realize how much different. I guess part of it was playing Varsity as a freshman and then sophomore. I don’t know, but he started turning into a prick, but he was my friend and I didn’t want to just bail on him.

“Anyway. They’d been fighting a lot. Adam cheated on her and she broke up with him. Adam kept trying to get Chrissy back, but she wouldn’t talk to him. He talked me into getting her to meet me. He wanted me to tell her I wanted to talk to her. And because she trusted me...she agreed.”

I stop talking, feeling more like an idiot as I go along. Why did I listen to him, anyway? It wasn’t my business to get in the middle.

“What happened next?” Charlotte asks.

“It was at a party, which again, stupid, but I wasn’t thinking. We’d all been drinking so she comes and we meet in this room, and then Adam comes out with flowers and stuff for her. She was upset at first, but then he gave her the flowers and said he was sorry and started to beg her to talk. I left them in there and I went outside. It wasn’t long that I was gone, but…damn, I don’t know. I guess I just had a bad feeling so I went back in and the door was locked. I knocked, but nobody answered and I started freaking out.