Page 46 of Summer After Summer

“There’s something I should’ve told you.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m about to tell you I’m dying.”

“Well, aren’t you?”

“No.”

But he is. He’s about to tell me that we’re dying, and that’s just the same.

“What should you have told me?”

“Here,” he says, sitting down on the bed and patting it. “Sit.”

I sit next to him, and he takes my hand. It’s the same hand I’ve been holding all week, inside soft, outside roughened, but the warmth has gone out of it.

“Last year,” Fred says, “at school, I started dating this girl. Phoebe. I’d had a crush on her for a while, since middle school.”

Phoebe. Her name is Phoebe. I hate her. “Okay.”

“She never used to pay any attention to me. I … I was different in middle school. I was a nerdy kid who liked fantasy books, and I grew late, and I was overweight.”

It’s hard to imagine it, but I understand what he’s telling me. He was that kid. The one who got picked on. The one the girls ignored until, suddenly, they didn’t anymore.

“And then there was the whole dead-dad thing. Which coincided with me growing and thinning out and learning to not talk about books so much.”

“Except with me.”

He smiles briefly. “Except with you.”

“So, Phoebe.”

“It was great at first. First-girlfriend stuff. You know.”

I swallow through the lump in my throat. First-girlfriend stuff. Like with us, he’s telling me. Only it wasn’t with me; it was with someone else.

“Right.”

“I thought everything was going great, and then I found out about the game.”

“What game?”

“This stupid thing the girls were doing with bracelets.”

The bracelets. It had happened at my school too. Suddenly, a bunch of girls were wearing colored gummies on their wrists, and each one meant a different thing they’d done with a boy. The more bracelets, the more clout. It was gross, and when the parents found out, they were banned, and at least two girls got sent away to these super-strict boarding schools in Utah.

I’d never had any, but Ash had a couple when she arrived in the Hamptons last summer. “Were you a bracelet?”

“I was.” He shakes his head. “Apparently, I was extra points because I was ‘sad boy.’”

“That’s terrible.”

“Yeah, well, I found out that Phoebe was only in it for the bracelet. And she wasn’t too careful about who she told. Or who she was getting the other bracelets with.”

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