Present Day

Pete

I don't tell her everything about that day, naturally. I leave out the contract. I believe Renee fed her some bullshit about familial rights.

She looks a little angry. No, not angry... disappointed? Like she's pissed that she came damn close to being okay, and we left her there.

"I don't remember any of that," she said.

"Well, you were pretty young, and sometimes people-"

"Block out painful memories." She shrugs. "Maybe."

God, I think as I watch her. It's so hard to believe that this is the same little girl who was bleeding on the floor a decade ago. She looks so grizzled now. She's a beautiful kid, don't get me wrong, but there's something distinctly world-weary to her now, as though nothing could hurt her any more.

It was sad. Believe me, there is nothing I hate more than my own ineloquence, but there's no other way to say it. It just hurt. To see her again, to know what was coming, and for Renee to still give her hope like that. We sat in silence for a few moments, all the emotional stickiness making us both feel, I thought, slow and awkward.

We headed back to the library after we finished eating, and we were both buried in research that I knew from experience would probably never come up again when Jamie said suddenly, without looking up from her book: "Thank you."

I too continued to scratch out notes. "For what, the food? It's free. We snitch taxpayer money sometimes." I shrugged.

"No, I'm serious." Her lack of light banter, something I had already taken to be her signature move and first line of defense, caused me to look up, adjusting my black frames.

She looked, for the first time since I had met her, genuinely uncomfortable. There's a difference between feeling awkward, the way she so obviously had when Renee had tried to thrust her into a leadership position, and getting that weird itchy feeling that makes you want to light yourself on fire. Or melt into the floor. Or pitch yourself into the fires of hell.

I used to get that feeling a lot as a teenager.

She makes eye contact with me, then looks away quickly, reminding me abruptly that she's just a fourteen-year-old kid.

My God. If the world wasn't such a bitch, she'd just be a freshman suffering through earth science.

She talks to her book, making me smile as I think of myself doing the same thing while asking Jem out when I was her age.

"Just, you know, for... Not letting me die, back in the day. Or whatever."

Evidently this took a shit load of courage for her, and we make really brief smiling eye contact that should be awkward but isn't. And then we look away, really quickly.

"You're welcome, kid," I say into my notes, and we lapse again into a companionable silence.