Page 38 of Places We've Never Been

He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes a bit, focused on the cloudless blue sky above.

“What?” I asked.

“Like who?”

I laughed. “You had other friends.”

He let his palm skim over the clear water next to him. “I probably had more enemies than friends.”

In school, Skyler always had a sketch pad and weird facts at the ready. It drew the attention of people who weren’t as sure of themselves as he was. Butenemywas an aggressive description. “Like who?”

He stared at me for a long moment, contemplating whether to say something. But in the end all he said was “Oh, you know, that online bully inMinecraft.”

“I only bullied you occasionally,” I joked. I wasn’t going to force him to tell me something real. We’d literally just confessed we didn’t trust each other.

“And Willow?” he said. “I don’t remember her.”

“She moved to town in seventh grade but I didn’t meet her until eighth. You probably never met her before you left.”

“I didn’t.” He drummed the side of the tube with his fingers. “And how is it?”

“How is what?”

“Being in with the popular crowd?”

I wanted to say that I wasn’t, but he was right. Willow had somehow dragged me kicking and screaming into the morewell-known group at school over the last couple years. Probably the main reason I never felt like I could be myself—I didn’t belong there. “How do you know my friends?”

“I’ve seen some of your posts.”

Right. We may not have communicated much lately, but we did still follow each other on social media. I just thought he hadn’t been paying attention. “It can be fun,” I said. And that was true.

He nodded slowly.

I didn’t understand that reaction. I really didn’t know him at all anymore and that killed me. He’d given up art and he stared at his phone and was judging me for who I hung out with even though he lived thousands of miles away. And he ran. On purpose. “What do you…Why did…”

“What?” he asked.

“You’re different.” I didn’t mean to sound sad when I said it, but I knew I did.

“So are you.”

My mouth opened, then closed. I couldn’t argue with that. I was. At least on the outside.

His eyes lit up as he looked at something over my shoulder, downstream. “It’s your tube.”

My tube was turning circles in some sort of dead zone. He hopped out of our tube, nearly flipping me for the second time that day. And by the time I’d centered myself and paddled to face the front, the river had separated us again.