Wes went home to pick up his brothers before the sun was fully up and they were awake, slipping in as if he’d never left. Even though his brothers knew where he was, he didn’t want his parents to see him not home and worry. It doesn’t take much to trigger the panic now. I felt it—the moment he left. It’s this irrational rush of adrenaline that leaves behind a sour taste and strange feelings I may not see him again.

I ate my Pop-Tarts by the front window, and when I was done, I sat there with the empty packet in my hand watching the car outside my house with the officer inside whose job it is to babysit me—babysit us, I guess. I sat there until Taryn’s car pulled in my driveway and life picked back up as it normally does, only it was nothing close to normal.

If it ever was.

I filled Taryn in on everything on the drive to school. It’s hard to hide an unmarked police car in front of my house. It’s also hard to hide the smile on my face. I shouldn’t have one—my tiny family is being threatened. But I smile anyway. I did it with my head turned away as we drove here, and I smile now in the gym, as Wes and I exchange quick glances and speak to each other with single looks and lingering touches. His fingertips ran over mine when I hung my jump rope as he reached for it, and his knuckles brushed against my thigh while bending down to adjust the weights on the bench press I was standing near.

Every touch shocks those parts of my body alive that he now owns, and my grin can’t be helped.

“Hey,” Taryn says, kicking her toe toward me and knocking me out of my trance. I’ve been lifting the same light weight in a bicep curl for minutes, poorly masking my stare at Wes.

“What’s up?” I turn away from her and walk a few steps away from the training table she’s sitting on. It’s a move to avoid her that she calls me on the minute I walk back.

“Heyyyyy?” The awkward hey slides slowly from her mouth, and I can’t help but silently laugh at it. “Are you okay?”

I suck in my lips and think of the best way to answer her. I shouldn’t be okay, and a lot of me isn’t. But then…

“I don’t really know. I…I slept with Wes.”

This isn’t anything shocking—not to Taryn, not to anyone really. For most of my small world, this is just a less-than-hushed rumor being whispered about Joss Winters sleeping with a guy.

But this—what happened between me and Wes—it’s different to me. I wouldn’t be able to put it to words, other than love, and it feels so cliché and hokey to say that he’s special because I love him, and this means more, but it’s the truth.

This…it means more. Wes Stokes means more than anything ever has, other than my own dreams. And right now, the two run parallel.

I stare at Taryn, my lips closed, wanting to curve, but also not wanting to draw any attention to our conversation. I slide up on the table to sit next to her, and she quirks a brow, puckering her lips, ready for juicy gossip, I’m sure. I don’t need other people hearing my stories, though, because it will just become this joke with the rest of the guys in here. I’ve always been treated differently by the guys at my school—somewhere between being one of them and being this conquest they want to tame. But Wes isn’t a joke. There is no game. There’s only us and trying to survive this story we’re in.

“When?” Taryn says, her voice hushed.

“This morning,” I answer. “He stayed over…and I woke up early. I know how it sounds, but the time was just…I don’t know…right?”

I avoid her stare, though I feel it hot on my cheek. Instead, I look out to Wes, standing with his brothers, as they should be. I haven’t thought much about Shawn and his relationship since we briefly talked about it, and I think maybe that’s for the best, because these boys…they are his family. There’s a difference between biology and real love, I’ve learned. My own mother has taught me that.

“All right,” Taryn says. I don’t turn in response, even though her reaction surprises me. I half expected her to make an off-color joke about how only I could find time to let a boy get in my pants when my world was falling to shit again. But she didn’t, and I think it’s because she knows just how special this thing between me and Wes is, too. Instead of talking about the details, we both sit with our backs against the wall watching the two boys we love—brothers—spot each other on the bench press while their third brother and Kyle sit close by, laughing.

“Sometimes I can almost see us all as kids,” my friend says.

I hum, picturing it for myself. There’s so much of the little boy who saved me in Wes, but I think maybe I’m the only one with the ability to see the subtleties masked by the man he’s quickly become.

“Do you think we would have been friends?” Taryn asks.

This time I look to her, and she turns enough to meet my gaze.

“You mean all of us?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says, rolling her head along the wall to look back out at the boys who, I know in my heart, any one of them, would do anything for us. I turn to do the same, and think about her theory, picturing smaller versions of ourselves, knowing what I know about who I was then, who Taryn and Kyle were—who Christopher was.

“I don’t think so,” I say. Seconds pass before she speaks.

“I don’t think so either,” she says.

We don’t dissect the conclusion we both came to, but I know our reasons are the same. Kyle, me, Taryn—we were this close-knit threesome that sometimes…sometimes…allowed Kyle’s brother Conner to make us a group of four. I’ve always thought it was just me, that I was the hard bubble to crack, but I was never in it alone. None of us were. No kid is. We fought just to be the kids that weren’t noticed for being different. We couldn’t let the different kids ruin the picture we’d worked so hard to paint for everyone just to be nice to them.

But we got older, and I’m disappointed in my younger self.

“I could have found him…Christopher?”

I feel her shift, but she remains silent, her eyes on the boy full of secrets.

“I think about that a lot,” I say, pausing to suck in my lips. “I replay the day at my house…the races. I wasted too much time; I was never really looking for him. And I bet he was alone. At the hospital, and later with the Woodmansees. He didn’t have any friends, and his foster family was so awful.”

My eyes move to my knees as I chew at the inside of my cheek, thinking about how deep that story goes—the details only I know, about Shawn being Wes’s real father.

“We were kids,” Taryn says, trying to soothe my conscience.

I shrug.

“He was a kid,” I say.

It’s what I always come back to. He was just a kid, but he still chose to save me rather than look on at the horror like everybody else. I wonder if I would do the same.

“You had a lot going on,” Taryn says quickly, not letting me slide into guilt too deeply.

I feel her hand brush against my thigh, so I turn to her.

“You never really answered,” she says.

My brow pulls in.

“Are you okay? You didn’t really answer.”

I hold my friend’s gaze, my insides still feeling twisted and uncertain about almost everything.

“It’s because I don’t really have one,” I say. “But…” I pause, nodding back toward our boys, laughing loudly at something Kyle said. “I love him, T. I love someone, and that has to mean I’m okay in some ways, right? Like…some ways I never thought I’d be okay again?”

“Yeah,” she says, and I can hear her smile in her tone.

I push off from the training table to walk back to where the boys are standing, and I make it most of the way before my brief moment of feeling good is shot to hell by a dick football player.

“Dad try to run you over again, Josselyn?”

I barely have time to register the chortle of laughter from a meathead who amused himself. The words come out of Zack Ramsey’s mouth in one breath, and before I can turn to face him, Wes’s fist is crashing into Zack’s nose, sending a gush of blood to the concrete floor. The slap of flesh pounding bone comes hard and fast followed by the rush of feet along the floor and young testosterone shouting, sliding heavy metal weights back to the walls, giving Zack and Wes space.

I don’t want this. Wes doesn’t need it in his life, and the kinda shit Zack said is really nothing I haven’t heard before. People around here can be assholes. I would know—I was one of the assholes.

“Wes, stop!” I shout, moving close to the brawl where Wes is straddling Zack on one knee, his punches falling into him hard.

Zack pushes Wes’s hands out of the way, grabbing his wrists with every blow, rolling his body loose from the hold Wes has on him until his leg breaks free enough to fly at Wes’s face and hit him square in the eye. His face should be bruised or swollen—but it isn’t.

“That’s enough!”

Mr. Wilshire’s booming voice fills the room, and most of the boys step away, but Wes and Zack keep attacking one another.

Our school’s wrestling and football coach, Mr. Wilshire splits time up in the gym with my dad. He’s twice my father’s size, but my dad’s authority rules with a heavier hand. He can crush a kid with the right words, and fights—they don’t happen in front of my dad. I wish he was here now.

“Wes…Zack…stop it!” I shout, grabbing the end of Wes’s T-shirt and holding it in my fist so tightly that it rips as his body lunges forward.

“Please! Please just stop!” My voice shrills, and Wes swings his arm with half strength at Zack, getting up from the floor and tugging his shirt, ripping the strip I tore from the bottom and throwing it on the ground between him and Zack.

“You don’t say shit like that!” Wes’s eyes are wild as he paces, taking long strides toward Kyle then back to the ground where blood now spreads. This time, he points before he speaks. “That’s not okay. You don’t say shit like that. Not to her.”

Zack’s chest heaves, his eyes wincing with the deep breaths. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of his ribs was broken.

“Wes, it’s okay,” I say.

“No,” my boy says, turning to me with the sharpness of that word. His eyes hold mine and he pants as his muscles start to relax until the fist at his side finally uncoils. “No,” he says again, the word quieter this time.

“You’re right,” I say, stepping closer until I can touch him. I move my hand to his arm slowly, my fingers eventually grasping around his bicep, hot from having been so filled with rage. “It’s not okay, but I’m used to it. And I don’t care about Zack. I don’t care what he thinks about me, about my dad. Zack’s an asshole who can’t catch a ball—so they made him a lineman, even though he’s too small to stop anyone.”

“Fuck you, Joss!” Zack shouts, finally standing from the floor, spitting as he moves to the other side of the weight room.

“No, I’m pretty sure today it’s fuck you, Zack. In fact, fuck you all,” I say, backing from the room, dragging my finger through the air and pointing to the people in here who know nothing about me other than the stories they heard and memories of one afternoon in my front yard when we were all kids.

“Office,” Mr. Wilshire says, tugging on the shoulder of Zack’s sleeve. “Both of you…now!”

Waving his bulging arm, the man armed with a whistle and a six pack turns red in the face as he ushers all of us out of the weight room, throwing out threats he has no intention of following through on, like closing the weight room for good.

My dad will just open it again. And closing it won’t stop people from being assholes. It won’t even slow them down.

My friends and I all follow Wes and Zack to the office, and we wait outside, taking turns staring through the slender window in the door that stands between us and the dean’s office.

“Can you see anything?”

I’ve had my face pressed to the glass the longest, my eyes straining to look around the corner where the dean’s office door is open.

“No, but he’s been in there for a while. Zack is still sitting in the hallway,” I say.

Zack flipped me off the first time he saw me looking at them. I ignored him, like my parents always told me to do with bullies. It’s the only time I’ve heeded that advice, and I only did it because I have no use or time for Zack.

Kyle’s shoulder rubs against mine, so I move an inch or two to the left to give him room to look on with me. We both stand in silence while Wes’s brothers and Taryn whisper, replaying everything as they saw it, getting their stories in order to make sure none of this lands on Wes.

“He deserved it, you know,” Kyle says.

“Probably,” I respond.

“No probably. He did. And Wes was right. You don’t say things like that…” he says, swinging his arm into me. I turn just enough to catch my friend’s eyes. “Not to you. People don’t get to say things like that to you anymore. I shouldn’t have ever let them get away with it in the first place.”

The right side of my mouth tugs up in response, and I lean into him.

“I can take care of myself,” I say, and Kyle lets out an airy laugh, his eyes flitting from me back to the glass in front of us.

“He’s coming,” Kyle says, backing away.

I freeze for a second, and Wes stops where he is, his eyes finding mine through the small window. Blood stains are on his shirt, and I know they aren’t his. I bring my hand up in front of my body, resting the tip of my finger on the glass as my head falls forward against it, and Wes’s eyes sweep shut, opening when his head dips down and his focus drops to his feet. I back away, letting my finger draw a short line down the glass as I move.

Wes pushes the door open, and everyone stands the moment his hand curls around the door’s edge.

“Let’s get out of here.”

His head turns slowly, his eyes catching his brothers’ first, then stopping on mine. His lips are a flat line, and his face is void of emotion, but his eyes tell the full story. It’s time.

“Okay,” I say, reaching my hand out to grasp his.

My step falls in with his as he lets the door close behind him, and I catch the glares from our friends as we walk past them toward the exit. They aren’t sure what Wes means, and they don’t understand if they’re supposed to stay or come.

I nod my head toward the open hallway and level them with my gaze, trying to invite them without saying the words. After a few seconds, they follow. We all walk quietly through the silent hallway, classroom doors closed, the only sounds from muffled lectures as we pass each room.

Wes pushes the door wide, and I step through with him, holding the edge long enough so Kyle can catch it to let Taryn, TK, and Levi come through next. Wes walks silently all the way to his truck, opening the passenger door for me. Our friends stop a few paces shy, brows furrowed and confusion scribbled across their faces.

TK is the first to break the silence, “Are we…ditching?”

“Yup,” Wes says, taking my hand to help me inside. I give him a crooked smile, and he shoots me one back, leaning in enough to brush his lips on mine before stepping back to shut the door.

Our friends pile in the back, and Wes climbs into the driver’s seat, watching in the mirror until everyone’s sitting down and holding on. He fires the engine up, pulls from his spot, and drives timidly through the lot and out to the main road. Once the school is in the distance, though, his foot grows heavy on the gas, speeding us away from the weight room, from the dean’s office, and from dick holes like Zack.

“Did they suspend you?”

My voice is hoarse. I slide my hand along the seat until my fingertips graze his jean-covered leg, and he glances down, moving his hand to cover mine and giving it a squeeze.

“No, just a good warning,” he says, quirking a lip and laughing once. “Being the missing boy who finally came home has its perks, I guess.”

I smile, but it fades quickly. My heartbeat picked up the second Wes leapt at Zack, and it hasn’t really slowed down since. His secrets aren’t mine to tell, and I know that what he’s about to do is harder on him than it is me, but I have this selfish worry nevertheless. Things are going to change.

Wes drives us beyond our neighborhood, rolling through stop signs until he turns off on a dirt road that winds behind the drive-in movie theater. His tires kick up dust, and my eyes search people who may see us. We’re out here alone, though.

“Why here?” I ask, thinking about our last trip here, and what I did.

“I came here a lot when I was gone,” he says, turning the wheel hard and parking the truck in the shadow of the largest movie screen. After breaking, he shifts to park and kills the engine, sighing hard as his hands fall to his legs and his back rests heavy in the seat behind him. His head rolls to the side and his eyes meet mine. “I had this fantasy that you’d come here to think too, and then you’d see that I was okay, that I was watching you, and you’d understand and be okay with what I had to do.”

“You know that’s crap, right?” I respond.

Wes’s chest lifts with a short laugh.

“Yeah, that’s why I said fantasy,” he says, his mouth resting in a tight-lipped smile.

A heavy pound echoes about our heads, and we both twist in our seats to see Levi’s face as he squats behind the back window in the bed of the truck.

“Did you bring us all out here to watch y’all make out? Or are we going to blow off some steam?” Levi’s head swivels, his eyes shifting from mine to Wes’s. I glower at him eventually and reach for the handle on my door.

“You better run,” I shout, and Levi’s eyes flash wide.

“Oh shit!” he shouts, kicking his legs over the edge of the truck bed just as I rush out of the cab.

I sprint after him for a few steps, grabbing the bottom of his T-shirt, but losing my grip as he spins around, laughing loudly and feigning to be genuinely scared of me until his feet tangle underneath his body and he falls into a tuft of weeds.

“She didn’t even have to touch you, dude!” TK says, stepping forward and holding his hand out to his brother to help him back to his feet.

“I know my place, man. I know Joss could kick my ass. I’m not like you, all delusional and shit, thinking I’m a better ballplayer than she is,” Levi says, not quite fully standing as he speaks. TK’s smile contorts into a grimace and he pulls his hand away, sending his brother right back to his ass, which makes us all laugh hard—even Wes.

I walk over to where Wes is leaning against the side of his truck, and I fold my arms over my chest and lean with him. We both watch his brothers and Kyle take turns kicking dirt at each other while Taryn sits on the truck’s hood, pointing and shouting out insults to them all. It’s the first time in forever that we’ve all felt young and stupid, and I let the feeling brand itself on my insides, because I know how fleeting it is.

Eventually, his brothers stop wrestling, and an edge settles over us all. No one wants to be the first to ask what this is about, and I don’t want to break the ice until Wes is ready to share, so we all wait, uncomfortable silence ruling as we do things like kick at the tire of the truck, pick ragweed, and blow pollen into the breeze.

“What are we doing here, man?” Kyle finally asks. His eyes remain steadfast on Wes, and I know that he has an idea of what this is all about. It’s why he’s not looking at me. My friend is playing along for the good of the rest of us. He’s playing along to make me feel okay, and so feelings aren’t even more hurt that I’ve shared the most with him.

Wes breathes in long and slow, but exhales fast, his lips closed tight as the air escapes through his nose. His arms fall from their hold over his chest, and his hands find his pockets as he kicks a rock forward near where he stands, crossing his ankles and looking down at his feet. His hat hides his expression from our friends, but from the side, I see him struggling. His mouth hangs open, and his eyes blink while he searches for words.

“I’m sorry that there are news trucks parked outside our house sometimes,” he says, looking up and bringing a hand to his face, his fingers scratching at his cheek while he draws his mouth in on one side and pinches his brow.

“It’s all right, man,” TK says, shaking his head and shrugging.

“No…it’s really not,” Wes chuckles, shaking his head and eventually covering his face with both hands. He rubs as he laughs, then stops instantly, his face tilting to the sky as he stretches his arms out, looking for answers.

“Just tell them,” I say as his laughter dies down. Wes’s chin falls and he turns his head to me, his eyes heavy with uncertainty. “They’re your family. We all are.”

Wes closes the small distance between us and cups my cheeks, pulling my head toward his and resting our foreheads together. “I love you something fierce,” he whispers, and for the first time in an hour, my pulse begins to slow.

His lips brush against mine before he backs away, walking to the tailgate of the truck and flipping the hitch, lowering it so he can climb inside. All eyes are on him as he steps up along the rim of the truck’s bed, then climbs to the roof of the cab, his black Vans heavy as he steadies his feet. I can see his muscles twitch with nerves, and his hands go back in his pockets on instinct as his eyes scan the back lots of the drive-in.

“When the bus rolled into the river and I jumped in to save Joss’s dad, I didn’t drown,” he says. The ground near me rustles as his brother’s shuffle their feet and fidget with their own arms. I glance to the side and catch them looking at each other; Kyle and Taryn are looking down.

“I guess that’s obvious, because…ha, right…I’m alive,” Wes says, stretching his arms out to his sides. “What I meant, though, is…yeah…I got banged up good along the rocks, and I was caught in the undertow for…” He pauses, pushing out a short breath from his nose and smirking. “I was underwater for a long-ass time. I should have drowned. I should have been bloody, cut to shit from the rocks and glass, metal and branches…hell, the pieces of bus caught in the undertow with me. But I wasn’t. My body fought the current for miles.”

“How many miles?” TK says, looking up to meet his brother’s eyes.

There’s a long pause as the two of them stare into one another. Finally, Wes answers.

“Maybe a hundred,” he says.

TK’s chest lifts slowly, and I never see him exhale. Wes continues to look at his brother as he speaks.

“When I climbed out, I went straight to Shawn’s,” he says, pausing to let his words really register. Both Levi and TK breathe out, and when I glance to their faces, I catch the way both of their jaws grow rigid with hurt and confusion—with resistance. “Not because I didn’t want to come home.”

Wes swallows.

“I just…”

“You just what? You wanted to make us think you were dead so we could watch mom not eat for a week? Watch dad fumble trying to keep things normal, even though we could hear him consoling mom at night while she cried herself to sleep?” TK shouts, walking to the back of the truck and climbing into the bed.

Wes shakes his head and turns, preparing himself to take whatever his brothers need to lash out with. I was in their shoes not so long ago. This path they’re on—it has to be walked.

“Was this some fucked up joke then? I don’t understand Wes!” TK climbs to the rooftop to stand facing his brother, his hands to his sides, both in fists. He shakes his head slowly and his eyes narrow on Wes, and I step in closer, catching Wes’s gaze. He shakes me off, but I stay close. I’m pretty sure he’s not handling this smoothly, and no matter how invincible he is, it’s still hard to watch him get knocked down. And he’s going to.

“You better make this make sense really fuckin’ fast, bro,” TK says, stepping forward and pushing at the center of Wes’s chest with both of his palms. Wes’s feet stumble a little, but his face never drops his resolve. He’ll take it all.

“TK, let him talk,” Levi says, walking to the front of the truck, his palms on the hood next to Taryn, whose eyes are wide and darting from mine to her boyfriend.

“Let him talk? We thought this asshole was dead, and instead, he was just having a sleepover at Uncle Shawn’s,” TK says, turning to face Wes again.

“At my dad’s,” Wes responds, and TK’s eyes slit even more, his mouth closed tight, puckering.

Wes’s feet are steady, but his body is relaxed, his shoulders sloping and his thumbs hooked in his pockets. TK’s nostrils flair with every breath he takes until he starts to shake his head, chuckling. Without warning, his arm lunges forward and his fist strikes Wes in the jaw, sending him back on his feet, his balance faltering and his body falling flat to the dirt ground by the driver’s side door.

TK walks to the edge of the roof to look over at him, his eyes red and his fist still formed, ready to strike again. But when Wes stands up easily and brushes the dust from his jeans, rolling his shoulders a few times from the fall, TK’s face softens. This time, he’s the one who takes a step back.

“I was at my dad’s,” Wes repeats.

He and TK lock eyes for long, quiet seconds.

“Shawn…” Levi starts.

Wes looks over to his other sibling, shifting his jaw from side to side slowly before finally nodding once, a small lift of his chin. TK’s legs falter, so he kneels on the truck roof, finally sitting with his feet dangling over the edge. Kyle comes closer to me, leaning on the truck’s side and waiting patiently, never once letting on that he knows everything that’s coming. If only he did. There are so many things that I would never be able to explain. Only Wes can do that.

“Shawn Stokes is my dad.” The words stumble out of Wes’s mouth slowly, almost as if he’s still trying to convince himself by hearing his voice say them.

Levi’s eyebrows raise, and he blows out air as he pinches the bridge of his nose.

“How?” he asks.

Wes’s mouth grins on one side, but his eyes sag. He lets out a breathy sarcastic chuckle.

“He paid a hooker to sleep with him. Knocked her up. She wasn’t the mothering type, so…” He swings his arms out to either side, presenting himself. I don’t care how he was made; I’m just glad that he was.

“Okay, so Uncle Shawn…” TK begins.

“Is my dad,” Wes finishes.

The three brothers all stare into the same emptiness between them for several seconds.

“Fuuuuuck,” TK says, breaking the brief silence, but only for a moment. They all go back to it, and while they stare at nothing, Kyle, Taryn, and I flit glances to one another.

The air around us grows warmer from the rising sun. Fall in Bakersfield isn’t much of a fall at all—the temperatures rival most summers for everywhere else. It’ll be in the eighties today, and we’re all beginning to perspire from the stickiness, but no one dares to suggest we leave this place. Wes came here because he knew no one would come looking. He’s only just begun to share his story, and he needs the comfort of being somewhere secret. I knot my hair on top of my head and roll the sleeves of my T-shirt up over my shoulders.

“Tell them the rest,” I say, bringing Wes’s attention to me first, and within a breath, everyone else’s along with it.

His eyes lock on mine as he opens his mouth to speak, staying with me the moment the words come. All I can do is smile faintly as he begins, but it seems to be enough. He doesn’t hesitate; he tells them everything.

“He never called me his,” he begins, his choice of words hitting my chest. How long did he go through life belonging to no one? “I’d always get taken back to him, though. You know…when things didn’t work out? I figured that was just how the system went.”

His eyes flit down briefly, and his lip rises with a short laugh.

“I guess I thought it was like with a puppy from a rescue or something. If the dog wasn’t a fit, you just brought it back to the rescuer,” he says, his mouth falling as his eyes come back to mine. “Only he wasn’t rescuing me. Whatever is the opposite of that word…sabotage, maybe? Using for sure—definitely using me.”

TK slides from the roof of the truck, his feet crunching on the ground, and everyone begins to make small movements to settle their nerves, now rattled with Wes’s story.

“There’s a reason Mom and Dad never take us over to his house,” he says, looking back to the ground, his feet kicking at the loose dirt and gravel, hands back in the safety of his pockets. His brow creases. “He’s sorta nuts.”

“What do you mean?” Levi asks.

Wes chews at the inside of his cheek and scrunches his eyes, searching for the best words.

“When I was a kid, I thought it was cool. He had all of these comic-book things, and he would always call me hero. He had this one book…”

His eyes scan up from the ground, back to mine; my breath pauses.

“It was filled with sketches, most of them color. He drew them,” he says, his hand rubbing against his chin as he smiles, his eyes glazing over with thoughts of his past. “The art is actually really good.”

The smile evaporates, and a heaviness regains control of his shoulders and chest.

“Maybe that’s part of the problem,” he says. “Those drawings were so good…so…real. He always told me I was the hero in them. He said he drew me because he knew my story, and I thought it was cool, because it looked like me. I guess anything pretend felt a hell of a lot better than where I was—a boy who didn’t belong to anyone.”

He smiles on one side of his mouth and glances at both of his brothers.

“You know…the hell that is foster care?”

TK and Levi both snort out a small, sad laugh and look down as it fades, burying this common hell they all share.

“It was all just this fantasy that I’d get to visit when I was with him, in-between the miserable families—if you can even call them families—that Shawn placed me with. I’d go to hell then come back to this world where I had powers, where I saved the day—”

Wes stops with his front teeth together, lips parted. His forehead dimples as his breath picks up just before his eyes meet mine again, and for the first time since I’ve learned the truth, I see just how terrified he was of not being able to stop the painful things his father predicted would come my way.

“And then a car came racing at this girl I liked more than anyone in the world, and without flinching, I dove in front of it to save her…just like the book said I would.”

I look inside him, my eyes boring so deeply into his that I can actually see the boy who lives inside. I see us, and that day, and all of the days that came before and after. We are forever connected. Shawn may have put us together, but the fact that we belong that way has nothing to do with him. Wes would have found me on his own; I’m sure of it.

“She’s the girl,” Levi says, his voice hushed.

“She’s the girl,” Wes echoes.

He looks at me with this unfathomable love that I never quite feel good enough to deserve. I’m starting to think that loving each other is a curse. Maybe that’s the moral of our story—we suffer and overcome, then risk again.

Levi runs his hand over his face, dragging his eyes down as he leaves his palm over his mouth.

“She’s the girl,” Levi says again, nodding this time.

Understanding.

“He has so many stories,” Wes says, his eyes not leaving mine. He wants me to see through him, to grasp all of the whys that kept him away. “I’ve lived so many of them. Catching dad when he fell from the ladder last year at Christmas, or stopping the truck from falling on my face when the jack slipped out last spring…”

Wes turns his head slowly with that last one, his eyes catching TK’s. His brother was there for that, and Wes said he slid out in time. He holds his brother’s stare through several deep breaths, the only sounds from buzzing insects and the humming highway miles away.

“The bridge collapse,” Wes continues, and TK’s head falls to the side slightly in response, his eyes sagging with sympathy. “Joss…” Wes continues, quieting for a moment to suck in his lips and shake his head, blaming himself still.

“Her leg,” he says.

Our collective stillness puts me on edge. The only other person who knows nearly as much as I do is Kyle, but hearing Wes speak openly about the fucked-up destiny his father swore him to—that he and I share—feels raw and new.

“I thought if I just stayed away, then the predictions would stop playing out,” he says, his gaze sliding back to me. “But what if it’s worse without me here? I figured maybe the real point is I’m supposed to stop something from killing you.”

“Nothing is going to kill me,” I say, feigning my confident self as I shake my head and look at my boy. I’m not entirely confident—not when loan sharks know where I live. But whatever is coming for me…for my dad—it’s nothing compared to the things I’ve survived.

Wes’s lips form a sealed line, and he breathes in deeply through his nose.

“You’re right,” he says. “Nothing will. I won’t let it.”

My lungs fill and my mouth is overcome with a sour taste because what Wes isn’t telling them is that the story never says I die—my father does. And while Wes is determined to protect me, I’m just as determined to save my tiny family.

“So what you’re saying is…” Levi begins, pushing away from the truck and stepping closer to his brother, stopping just out of his reach. He points a finger at Wes from his folded arms. “You can stop bad things from happening.”

“Some of them,” Wes says, a slight lift in his shoulders.

“Because you’re…like…”

This is where Levi stops. Saying anything more out loud feels childish and fantastical. I avoided it for a long time. In many ways, I still refuse, because underneath the strange things that Wes can somehow do…is a young man with a soft heart and a capacity to love that I once thought didn’t exist. Wes isn’t weird. He isn’t alien. He’s a gift—rare and mine.

“Because I’m like this,” he says, walking toward the front of the truck and holding out a hand to help Taryn slide down so she can stand next to TK. Wes lifts the hood high, propping it up with a metal rod I can tell he or his brothers or dad added to the truck themselves. Rubbing his palms together, he studies the engine, looking for just the right place to make his point, pausing once his gaze passes over a rounded metal box lodged on the right side of the motor. Wes reaches forward, his fingers outstretched, inches away from the searing-metal piece, but before he grips it, TK grabs his wrist.

“Dude, you’ll burn yourself. Don’t!” his brother says.

They both stare at one another for a few seconds, neither of them blinking, until one at a time TK’s fingers let go of Wes’s arm, as if he somehow knows what’s coming next and just isn’t sure if he’s ready to witness it. The moment he steps back from the space radiating with heat under their truck’s hood, Wes returns his attention to the part that would leave blistering, and likely debilitating, burns on anyone else’s skin. Without pause, he falls forward, gripping the box hard and flexing to make sure all of his hand is exposed.

We all watch breathlessly, and I glance to my side, catching the expressions on Kyle and Taryn’s faces. Their eyes, mouths, the paleness of their skin and the wash of disbelief that colors their cheeks—it’s exactly how I’m sure I looked the first time Wes showed me just how different he is. After a dozen seconds, he pulls his hand away, curling his fingers into a ball that he holds in front of his chest.

“It’s not that I don’t feel it, it’s just that…” He pauses for a deep breath, turning to face us all. He rolls his wrist, slowly opens his fingers, and unveils a slightly pink palm, and skin that looks like it’s never been harmed. Lips part and words hang on the tip of his tongue, as if even he is amazed at what he can do despite living with it for eighteen years.

“It’s that it doesn’t hurt like it should.”

No one moves for nearly a minute. Wes holds his hand open, on display for us all, and I know the urges that are kicking at everyone’s insides. Wes does, too. It’s why he doesn’t make eye contact with any of us. He simply waits until we’re ready—until one of us is brave enough to say something out loud.

Kyle is the first to move, only his first step isn’t toward Wes, it’s toward the open hood where he rests his elbows on the rim of the open cavity and rubs his palms together as his eyes narrow on the part Wes just touched.

“That’s your exhaust manifold,” Kyle says, reaching forward and holding his palm several inches away. “That should have puckered your skin and smelled like death when you touched it.”

He pulls his hand away quickly and rubs the back of it with his cooler palm, wincing as he does.

“A foot away and I’m pretty sure I singed away the hair on my knuckles,” Kyle says, looking at me first, then to Wes.

More silence follows—everyone is processing. Nobody knows what word to use to describe what we’ve witnessed, and I refuse to buy into Shawn’s story, to label Wes as he always has—as something super. But it’s hard not to go there when he does things like this. He’s human and whole. There’s nothing about him that’s otherworldly, other than these things he can do without getting hurt.

“You can touch hot things,” TK says, finally, pacing around the front of the truck, stopping next to Kyle and leaning in to point to the proof. “You don’t get hurt.”

Wes lifts a shoulder and blinks in acknowledgement.

“That’s some of it,” he says.

“Some of it,” TK repeats.

“I can take an impact, like say getting knocked on my ass by my brother from the roof of a truck seven feet up,” he says through a faint smile.

TK’s eyes haze and they shift from the rooftop down to the ground where Wes landed.

“A’right…what else?” he asks.

Wes pulls his lips in tight and breathes in through his nose, thinking.

“I can get hit by a car, straight on, going forty miles per hour, and come out with nothing more than a little temporary memory loss. I can roll down the highway, catching someone mid-air, at about the same speed, and walk away with a few scratches. I’ve held up cars for minutes at a time, even our truck…when I’m working on it alone and you guys aren’t around to see it. My reflexes are fast, too…like…I can catch things in the middle of the air at high speeds.”

“Like what?” TK continues, his face contorted. I think he’s waffling between a world of skepticism and one of awe.

“Rocks…” Wes says, his eyes swiveling to Levi’s. “Hit from a metal bat at twilight.”

Levi’s chest rises fast, his memory kicking in. It wasn’t long ago that we all played a game of makeshift baseball on the beach as the sun went down. Levi was pitching a rock, and Kyle’s brother Conner was swinging the bat. Wes saved me from being hit, and nobody noticed.

“You catch rocks,” TK says, smirking on one side of his mouth, letting out a short laugh. “That’s so unimpressive,” he adds, rolling his eyes.

He keeps the act going for a few seconds, spinning on his feet and wandering a few steps from us all before turning back, his hands in his pockets and his chin tipped up.

“So that fight in the weight room…when you went all caveman on Zack for saying that shit he said to Joss…”

“Yeah,” Wes says quietly, chewing at the inside of his mouth as he waits for TK’s real question to come.

His brother looks down at the ground as he steps forward, closing the distance until his nose is inches from Wes. TK tilts his head, and their eyes meet, but he lets everyone simmer in anticipation for a few more seconds.

“You hold back on that asshole?”

Wes’s mouth twitches with the urge to grin, but he holds it off for a beat, finally giving in and letting his lips curve up on the right as he nods once to his brother.

“I’m not the one bleeding,” he says.

“Joker, you just full-on felt up a steaming piece of metal in our crappy 1980s engine block with your bare hands. Don’t give me any of that ‘I’m not the one bleeding’ shit. You held back, you douchebag,” TK says, laughing through the end of his speech before hooking his arm around Wes’s neck, rubbing his head, and working to wrestle him to the ground.

Levi and Kyle start to laugh, too, and my chest fills completely with a breath I’ve been dying to take, each intake of air coming a little easier as what began as wrestling between Wes and his brother morphs into an embrace. TK’s hands move to Wes’s head, and with his eyes closed, he rests his forehead on his brother’s, rocking gently side to side on his strong legs. His jaw flexes in his fight not to cry.

“You’re my brother,” he says, and all Wes can do is nod, his eyes closed and his hands clinging to TK’s elbows. “Nothing ever stops that, you hear? Nothing. You and me and Levi—Mom and Dad. We’re family. No matter what.”

“I know,” Wes says, his words coming out through a hoarse whisper.

“You do now,” TK says. “You don’t have to handle things alone. You’ve got us…you’ve got me.”

Wes nods again, their heads still resting on one another. Their family makes me wish for a sister or brother of my own.

“So this book thing…” Levi says, breaking the peace and cutting through the air like a hammer through water. My mind flashes to my dad, to the situation we’re in, to that crazy trailer parked near the lake filled with answers and questions.

Wes and TK break apart slowly, and my boy’s eyes catch mine in short passes. His hands go back in his pockets, and my chest grows tight again.

“What comes next?” Levi asks the question the others all want to know.

Wes hitches his shoulders high and wobbles his head side to side, downplaying the unbelievable things he’s just shared.

“I don’t really know. They’re just stories, and it’s all probably just coincidence—like things I’m reading into, maybe remembering wrong…”

Wes’s words trail off as he looks at his brother. Levi steps closer, his posture a mirror to Wes’s, hands in his pockets, too.

“Family,” he says again, as if he has to remind him of the huge mountain of trust they’ve just climbed together.

Wes’s eyes shift to me again, and I exhale slowly, my eyes falling closed.

“It’s my dad,” I say, opening my eyes when my chin is tucked to my chest, so my focus is away from the stares I know I’m now getting.

“Like when we were kids?” Taryn asks in a whisper.

I shake my head no.

“Not his drinking, or anything happening to me. Something bad will happen to him. At least, according to the guy who kept giving his only son away to strangers just so he could watch over me,” I say, sharing more than I’d planned, but unable to hold back the pressure of it all inside.

I spare a glance up, and the faces are all as I expected—wrinkled, frowning and breathless. I suck in air fast, pushing it out just as quickly, but the tension in my body only squeezes tighter.

“I’m pretty sure Shawn was in love with my mom,” I say, my gaze moving to Wes. “He hates my dad. It’s not all that crazy that he fantasized about bad things happening to him.”

TK and Levi lean against the truck, arms folded over their chests, and Kyle kicks at the ground. I recognize where they are in their heads—they’re caught between calling the bullshit card and believing that some of this might just be for real. I’m caught there, too, honestly, but the one thing I’m certain of is that Shawn is pulling a lot of the strings, even if it is just by messing with all of our minds.

“Hey,” Kyle says, nodding his head up and squinting with one eye from the rising bright sun shining in his face. “You think next time we ditch we could go back to doing fun shit? You know, like swimming at the lake or pushing shopping carts around with the front of our trucks? Not that watching Wes try to hurt himself isn’t loads of fun, but for the most part…this morning’s been a bit of a downer.”

Our collective laughter starts quietly, but picks up fast, and soon Wes is rushing toward Kyle and lifting him over his shoulder, carrying him toward the truck.

“How about we push your ass around in a shopping cart in front of the truck?” he shouts through laughter.

“Atta boy,” Kyle yells, slapping Wes’s back hard before he puts him down.

Their eyes meet and make a silent agreement, and nothing else is said as we all climb into the truck and Wes drives us back to school. We’ll get dinged for being late, and I’ll use the car crash at my house as an excuse to buy us a little leeway. I’ll also probably prop a nail up underneath the back tire of Zack’s Camaro, because I found one in the pickup truck bed a minute ago and something told me I should put it in my pocket. Zack will know why it’s there, and he won’t say a word.

And Grace will be here soon.

My father will be home.

Everything will be just fine.