Page 17

Believe it or not, the people at Cold Stone are not thrilled when you come inside covered in blood. I guess, to be fair, it’s probably a health code violation. They did still let me use their restroom, but you could tell they didn’t like it, and attitude goes a long way in the service industry.

“Stop being such a baby,” Keme said as he dabbed at the back of my head with a paper towel. His heart wasn’t really in it, though— the words were snotty and loose. His eyes were so red and puffy that I was surprised he could see what he was doing, and his hands trembled against my hair. A few seconds later, he mumbled, “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. I still had that lucid brightness that might have been a warning sign. “I’m actually planning on being a huge baby about this.”

Keme’s groan might have qualified, barely, as subvocal.

“I’m going to make Bobby do so many sweet things for me.”

His sound of disgust, on the other hand, definitely moved into the vocal range.

“I’m going to make him give me a million kisses.”

“Why are you like this?” Keme moaned, but mostly to himself. “Why can’t you be a normal gay who can actually help me with my hair?”

“Keme, that’s such an ugly stereotype. And I did help you with your hair. Remember when Indira had to cut off that chunk in back because I got chewing gum stuck in it?”

To judge by the look on his face, Keme did, in fact, remember it, and I was quickly losing whatever pity points I’d earned.

The laceration on the back of my head had stopped bleeding, and aside from the beginning of a massive headache, I felt normal. Ish. Between the two of us, we got each other moderately cleaned up. Because I was now the walking wounded and, for a few precious hours, had the moral high ground, I insisted Keme let me buy him some ice cream, mostly so I wouldn’t be the only one eating ice cream. Also because I wasn’t sure the last time Keme had eaten.

In late October, Cold Stone didn’t exactly have a line out the door, so it wasn’t long before Keme and I were settling into a booth, me with a chocolate-dipped waffle-cone bowl of Birthday Cake Remix (extra sprinkles), and Keme with the boyest of boy flavors: Peanut Butter Cup Perfection.

We ate in silence for a while. Keme couldn’t look me in the eye.

He put his spoon down abruptly and said, “You might have a concussion.”

“I don’t think I do.”

For some reason, that made him roll his eyes. “You need to see a doctor.”

“Maybe.”

He picked up the spoon again and poked at a peanut butter cup. In a low voice, he said, “Bobby’s going to hate me.”

“Why? I tripped stepping off the curb, and you were nice enough to stick around and help me.”

“You can’t tell him—”

“That’s what happened, Keme. That’s what I’m going to tell him.”

Keme went very still and covered his eyes. His whole body tensed as he struggled. When he spoke, the words were so distorted they were almost unintelligible. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “No more apologizing, got it? We’re friends; friends don’t get hung up on the little stuff.”

He shook his head.

“You’re still my friend,” I said. “Am I still yours?”

It felt like a long time before he whispered—pleaded, really—“Dash.”

“And I love you.”

Honestly, the best part was I could actually see his adolescent boy horror rising at the prospect of feelings . He made himself smaller in the booth. His shoulders came up. He pressed his hands more tightly against his eyes. But you’ve got to give it to Keme: he doesn’t back down. Finally, he managed to say in a breathless rush, “I love you too.”

I let him dangle for about five seconds. Then I said, “That was literally the best thing of my life. I’m going to remind you, like, ten times a day that you told me you loved me. God, I wish I’d gotten it on camera.”

He dropped his hands. His eyes were wide and even redder than before, but a lot of the guilt and self-loathing had been replaced by, well, the usual mixture of teen indignation and outrage. “What is wrong with you?” he asked and then attacked his ice cream.

For a while, we sat in silence.

“It was the rent money,” Keme said. He was speaking into his ice cream, his gaze fixed on the dish—probably, I guessed, so he wouldn’t have to look at me.

“What?”

“That’s why I got in that fight with JT.” And then, as though I might be an idiot: “I didn’t kill him.”

“I know you didn’t kill him. What happened?”

“Mom said she’d paid him. The back rent, all of it. She gets a check every month, and I gave her some—” He stopped and blushed and then, as though daring me to ask follow-up questions, said, “I had some money for Homecoming tickets. I wasn’t going to use it, so I gave it to her. But then she told me it was too late, and they’d gotten evicted even though she paid the rent.”

“Had she paid it?”

He pushed his ice cream around morosely. “I don’t know. She’s not good at that stuff. She forgets.” His eyes came up in another challenge. “She’s not a bad person.”

There were so many things I wanted to say to this boy who was trying to defend the woman who had abandoned him. They all got caught in my throat, though, so I only nodded.

“I went to talk to JT about it. But he said she’d never paid, and I said she had, and he said if she didn’t have a receipt, then she hadn’t paid, and—and I lost my temper.” He picked at the vinyl banding on the table with his thumb. “I was already mad.”

He didn’t have to say, From seeing Millie and Louis , for me to know what he meant.

“My guess is Channelle was stealing rent money,” I said. “It’ll be hard to prove because she and JT are both dead, and I don’t know if JT was in on it.”

“He wasn’t,” Keme said. “He was fine until she came along.”

That was interesting, and I wanted to follow up on it, but there was something else to address first. “I don’t want to make you mad, but Foster might have stolen your mom’s money. I found a stash in the camper. Of course, he might have gotten it from Channelle—did you know they picked him up for the murders?”

Keme snorted. “He didn’t kill anybody.”

And he sounded so intensely self-satisfied that a sneaking suspicion raised its head.

“Keme,” I said.

He looked up from his ice cream.

“Did you beat Foster up?”

Keme’s got a great poker face, but you could practically see the testosterone radiating off him.

“Never mind,” I said. “I don’t want to know.” A hint of bitterness slipped out in spite of my best efforts as I added, “It would have been nice to get one solid lead on this murder, though.”

Neither of us seemed to know what to say to that.

I was the one who broke the silence, of course. Keme could have sat there all day and not said a single word. Literally.

“Do you want to talk about Millie?”

He glared at me over a peanut butter cup.

“I’m proud of you for telling her how you feel,” I said.

He made an unspeakably rude gesture that you definitely aren’t supposed to do in a Cold Stone.

“I know it’s not going to make you feel any better right now,” I said, “but I think you should be proud of yourself too. It takes a lot of courage to do what you did.”

That made him screw up his face into an even angrier look. He dug around with the spoon for a while before he finally burst out, “What does that mean?”

“What?”

“Why’d you say it like that?”

“Like what?”

He kicked me under the table.

“Oh my God, Keme!”

All I got, though, was a scowl.

“I was just thinking, though,” I said, “that the downside to acting like an adult, and to being brave, is that once you do it, well, you kind of are supposed to keep doing it.”

He ate some more ice cream before grudgingly asking, “What does that mean?”

“It means Millie wants to talk to you. And I know it’s going to be hard, but I think you might want to hear her out.”

“I don’t. She already said everything she needed to say.”

“If you believe that, you obviously don’t know Millie. More to the point, though, you two used to be inseparable. You were best friends. I’m not saying your relationship isn’t going to change, but it’d be a shame to throw it all away because you can’t get over a little embarrassment at having your pride hurt.”

Keme scraped his spoon around his now-miraculously empty ice cream dish. “This?” he said. “You acting like an adult? It’s so gross.”

“Thank you.”

He made a disgusted sound, tossed his spoon in the paper cup, and shoved it away. He stared out the window. He looked like every teenage boy in every teenage movie who is considering doing something he absolutely did not want to do.

“Being vulnerable is a two-way street,” I said into that gloomy, hormone-filled silence. “Yeah, it was very brave of you to tell her how you feel. But it takes a lot of bravery to listen, too. To sit there. To open yourself up to the other person when they need to tell you something. Because it means leaving yourself unguarded. And it means you can get hurt.”

Keme shook his head again, but it was softer this time, more tired than anything else.

“No one can blame you for feeling the way you do,” I said. “You have every right to be hurt, to be angry. The world isn’t a fair place, and it’s been particularly unfair to you.” I tried to think of the best way to say it, but I was tired and drained and possibly concussed, so I said, “But you don’t have to feel that way forever. Not if you don’t want to.”

Something spread across his face—the faintest ripple of whatever was moving deep below those still waters. “She doesn’t need me anymore. She has Louis.”

“No, Keme. She doesn’t need you. That’s a good thing, actually, because not a lot of healthy relationships are built on need. But she wants you. Wants you in her life, and maybe a lot more. And I think you want her in your life, too. But it means being brave again.”

He sat motionless. And the boy on the other side of the glass, that thinned-out reflection, he didn’t move either. When Keme spoke, the words were so quiet I could barely pick them up over the buzz of the fluorescents. “I don’t want to be brave anymore.”

And what I heard was I don’t want to get hurt anymore .

“Everybody feels that way sometimes,” I said. “That’s why we have friends. People who love us. Who will help us until we can be brave again.”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t nod. He stared out the window some more, and he looked as tired as an eighteen-year-old boy can be.

“Keme,” I said. “Please come home.”