Jayden? I thought about the boy I’d almost plowed over in the hall.
The girl looked over, head cocked to the side.
“Got it, Hector,” he replied, voice clipped, and I was struck by how deep his voice was now. A moment passed as his chin tilted toward me.
Flushing, I looked away, but not before I caught Hector’s curious green gaze flicker to me. The rest of the class was an exercise in stealing glances at him, as if I needed to see him to remind myself that he was seriously sitting there. I wasn’t really good at being furtive, because I was pretty sure the girl on the other side of him, the girl that had been touching him quite familiarly on the way into the class, caught me about half a dozen times.
As the minutes ticked by, my stomach began to churn around the ever-increasing knots that were forming. Anxiety circled like a viper waiting to attack with its crippling venom.
Pressure closed my throat, a steel vise squeezing until it eked every last breath out of me. An icy burn crawled up the back of my neck and then splashed across the base of my skull. My next breath hitched, and I felt it—the flash-flood feeling of losing all control.
Breathe.
I needed to breathe.
Curling my fingers into my palms, I forced my chest to rise and fall evenly and willed my heart to slow down. When I had been in therapy, Dr. Taft had drilled into me the fact that I wasn’t losing control of my body when this happened. It was basically all in my head, sometimes triggered by a certain loud sound or a scent that would throw me back in time. Sometimes, I wasn’t even sure what was triggering it.
Today I knew.
The trigger was sitting right beside me. This panic was real, because he was real, and the past he symbolized wasn’t a product of my brain.
What would I say to him when the bell rang and school was over? Four years had gone by since that night. Would he even want to talk to me? Or what if he didn’t want to talk to me?
Oh, God.
What if my being back here wasn’t something he’d hoped for or even thought about? He had... He had taken a lot of crap for me, because of me. While there were good moments over the course of our ten years together, there had been a lot of bad. A lot.
And it would... Yeah, it would suck if he got up and walked out of class without saying another word, but that would be better in a way. At least now I knew he was alive and appeared to be physically unscathed, and he seemed to be familiar with the girl on his other side. Maybe she was his girlfriend. That meant he was happy, right? Happy and whole. Knowing he was okay meant I could officially close that chapter of my life.
Except I’d thought I’d already closed the chapter. Now it was reopened, flipping all the way to the beginning.
When the bell rang, protection mode kicked in, like it had oh so many times in the past. I wasn’t even aware of what I was doing. An old instinct reared its head like a sleeping dragon, an instinct that I’d spent four years beating into submission, but had already caved to once today.
Standing, I scooped up my book and grabbed my bag off the floor. My heart slammed against my ribs as I darted around our seats, and I didn’t look back, didn’t give him a chance to walk away first. My sandals smacked off the floor as I hurried down the hall, easing past slower-walking students as I shoved the textbook into my bag. I probably looked like an idiot. Well, I felt like an idiot.
I burst outside and into the hot sun. Chin down, I followed the path to the parking lot, hands trembling as I opened and closed them, because it felt like the blood had stopped at my wrists. The tips of my fingers tingled.
The silver Honda gleamed up ahead, and I drew in a ragged breath. I would go home and I would—
“Mallory.”
My pulse spiked at the sound of my name, and my steps faltered. I was feet from my car, from escape, but I turned around slowly.
He stood beside a red truck that hadn’t been there when I parked this morning and that I hadn’t even noticed on my mad dash to my car. In the sunlight his hair was more brown than black, and his skin deeper, his features sharper. There were so many questions I suddenly wished I could ask. What had he been doing for four years? Did someone finally adopt him? Or was he moving from one foster home to the next?
Most important, was he safe now?
Not all group homes were bad. Not all foster parents were horrible. Look at Carl and Rosa. They put the awe in awesome. They’d adopted me, but before them, this boy standing before me and I had not been lucky. We’d been fostered by the worst kind of people who somehow managed to pass inspection. Caseworkers were underfunded and understaffed, and most did the best they could, but there were a lot of cracks to slip through, and we’d fallen right through one in the worst way.
Most foster kids didn’t stay in the system or one house longer than two years. Most kids were reunited with parents or adopted. No one besides Mr. Henry and Miss Becky had wanted us, and I still couldn’t figure out why they wanted us and yet treated us so badly. Our caseworkers came and went with the frequency of the seasons. Teachers in school had to have seen what we’d been going through at home but none risked their jobs to step in. The bitterness of being overlooked and stepped on for so long in an overburdened and broken-down system still clung to me like a second skin that I wondered if I’d ever shed.
But there was good and bad in everything. Had he finally found some good?
“Really?” he said, his fingers tightening around the old notebook he held. “After everything, after four years of not knowing what the hell happened to you, you just show up in fucking speech class and then run away? From me?”
I inhaled sharply as I lowered my arms. My bag slipped off my shoulder, hitting the hot asphalt. Shock flowed through me, but in the back of my mind, I wasn’t surprised that he’d caught up to me. He never ran. He never hid from anything. That had always been me. We had been yin and yang. My cowardice to his bravery. His strength to my weakness.