I blink the thought from my head, rub my watery eyes, and pluck a flake of weed from the pile and hold it between my thumb and my finger. “Who were you to decide what I wanted to know?” I mutter, my chest aching, along with my heart. “Why wouldn’t you ever just tell me things, instead of deciding for me that I was too good to know? Why couldn’t you just tell me and let me decide? Why wouldn’t you just talk to me, instead of deciding to leave me? Here. Alone. With a head full of fucking numbers. I feel so lost all the time…”

Suddenly the potential for a new, magical day is gone. The longer I sit there, the more pissed off I get, which only makes me feel guilty, but then the guilt makes me feel angry, and suddenly my head’s spinning and I can’t even remember sitting down.

Somewhere through the spinning and racing thoughts, I hear the door creak open, and Quinton comes walking inside. I quickly toss the flake down onto the pile, but it’s too late; he’s already seen me holding it. As he pushes the door open wider, he arches his eyebrow at me with curiosity written all over his face.

“What are you doing, sitting here by yourself?” he asks as Tristan walks in carrying a large cardboard box, his face red and beads of sweat coating his skin.

“Nothing.” I slump back in the chair, trying to ignore the stinging in my eyes. “I’m just sitting here.”

He looks at me suspiciously as he closes the door, then he saunters to the back of the couch and launches himself over it, landing on the cushion with a hard bounce. “Where did you run off to when you left my room?” he asks, kicking up his unlaced boots onto the table. He has three holes in the hem of his shirt and one in the collar, along with a few smudges and spots of ink and charcoal.

I shrug, fold my arms around myself, and grip my phone tightly in my hand. “I’ve been here the whole time. I promise.”

“Holy shit.” Tristan’s arm muscles are flexed as he drops the box down on the countertop. He wipes the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “This thing is fucking heavy.”

“Well you didn’t have to take all the pipes,” Quinton calls out. His glazed eyes are still fixed on me. “You could have just taken one or two.”

Tristan starts searching around in the box, taking out pipe after pipe and lining them up on the countertop. “And what? Turn down free pipes? That’d be fucking stupid of me.”

Quinton seems like he wants to argue with him, but he clenches his jaw shut and directs his attention to me. “But you disappeared for a while, right? Because when I walked through here just a bit ago, you weren’t here.”

That’s because I was in the bathroom, barfing my guts out because I think you’re hot, but I feel guilty about it. And then I decided to make a video about my twisted thoughts about you. I’m starting to grow flustered, so I try for a subject change. “Do you guys have anything to drink?” I blink my eyes against the smoke and then press my fingertips against my eyeballs. My head’s feeling a little heavy and lopsided.

Tristan peeks up from the box, and strands of his blond hair fall into his eyes as the corners of his lips tug upward. “Like a Corona or two or three?”

Staring blankly at him, I hold up my finger—not the middle one, even though I want to, which is a little blunt for me, but at the moment being blunt seems awesome. “One time.”

“One freakin’ memorable time.” Tristan teases, clutching a pipe in his hand. When I narrow my eyes at him, he starts laughing, and accidentally drops the pipe onto the ground. He bends to pick it up, stumbles a little, and bumps his head on the side of the counter. “Shit.” He stands up, rubbing his head.

I stare at the joints in the ashtray, a thin stream of grayish smoke slithering from them, and blurred, disjointed thoughts run in an uneven flow inside my head. “Why do you guys do it?” I ask, because I really want to know—understand—what Landon’s fascination was with it all the time. Why did he smoke it? How did it make him feel inside? Why was he so dead set on thinking that I was too good to smoke it and feel what it’s like to be high, yet he didn’t think he was good enough? Why? God damn it. There are always so many questions about him, about how he saw me, and I’ll never get an answer, because he’s not here anymore. The only way I’ll ever even possibly begin to know is to try and find out for myself.

Quinton tracks my gaze and then his face drops, like he just realized the joints were there. “Fuck, who left these burning out here?”

“They were like that when I came out,” I say, picking at my fingernails.

“Why didn’t you put them out?” Quinton asks me, allowing his feet to fall to the floor.

“I don’t know.” I rack my brain for my real answer and the one that comes to me is kind of frightening. Because I was thinking about smoking it. Because I wanted to see what it was like—what it was like for Landon. Why he thought I was too good to see what it was like.

He leans forward, picks them up, and scrapes the tips gently along the edge of the table, putting them out. “You don’t want this shit, Nova. Trust me. You’re too good for it.”

His words tear at my heart, because they’re so similar to what Landon used to say to me all the time. But they also annoy me. I want people to stop telling me I’m good when I don’t even know if I am. I’m not sure if my irritation is directed at him, though, or if I’m just lashing out on him because I’m frustrated with Landon for leaving me. Or maybe all the secondhand smoke in the room is bringing out an ugly side of me. “How do you know what I want? You don’t even know me.”

“And you don’t even know me,” he says calmly as he places the unlit joints on the table. He glances over his shoulder at Tristan, who’s distracted by the pipes in the kitchen, and then he leans in toward me and lowers his voice. “So let me give you a little insight. You don’t want to be here, sitting with me, talking to me, or asking me to go to concerts. You don’t want to know me, or this fucking fucked-up world I live in, Nova. Trust me.”

With a neutral expression, I slant forward and snatch a lighter and one of the unlit joints from off the table. “You don’t know me, either, and you don’t know what I want, so don’t try and tell me you do.” I know that what I’m doing is probably wrong, or at least that’s what I used to believe. Right now, I feel different. I don’t care about right or wrong. I don’t care about anything.

With an unsteady hand, I place the joint in my mouth, and ignoring both their protesting looks, I cup my hand around the end, and flick the lighter, figuring I can handle it. Nothing can prepare me for the fiery burn, though. As soon as the smoke hits the back of my throat, I cough and gasp for air. I lean forward, sticking my hand out, with the joint pinched between my fingers, wanting to get the joint as far away from my face as possible.

“Shit, Nova, are you okay?” Tristan hurries around the couch, removes the joint from my hand, and extends his hand out to the side of him, with the joint between his fingers, to get the smoke as far away from my face as possible. “What are you doing? You don’t do this shit.”

“You don’t know me either.” I sit up straight, still coughing while my eyes water.

Quinton frowns as he retrieves the joint from Tristan’s hand, and Tristan gives me a pat on the back, although I can tell he’s trying hard not to laugh at me.

Quinton positions the joint between his fingers, then he places the end between his lips, and his chest rises as he takes a deep inhale and holds it in. He balances the joint in the ashtray and relaxes back in the chair, letting his head fall back as he breathes out the cloud of smoke toward the ceiling. “Nova, you should go home,” he says in a sluggish voice, rubbing his hand over his face, as Tristan drops down in the sofa beside him, his eyelids growing heavy.

It feels like I should still be irritated at him, but I can’t really feel anything. My mind and body are numb and the counting and need for control are silent. Silence. Without even knowing what I’m doing, or whether I’m doing it because I want to understand, because the secondhand smoke has clouded my judgment, or because I actually want to do it, I slide my arm across the coffee table and grab the joint. Quinton turns his head and watches me as I place it into my mouth. Copying his exact movements, I let my chest expand as I suck in a breath, then I trap the smoke in my lungs, standing on the edge of the unknown, waiting and waiting, then finally I let it out, falling off the edge completely, wondering how hard it’s going to be to climb back up. Or if I’ll even want to.

Maybe this is what I’ve been searching for during the last year. Maybe I’ve been waiting around to fall. Maybe I don’t know what I want or who I am without Landon, and maybe this is all in desperation to figure stuff out.

Or maybe I’m just lost and I have no idea what the hell I’m doing.

Chapter 7

Quinton

This is an honest-to-God first for me. I’m ripped out of my mind, nearly floating to the ceiling—or falling to the floor, depending on how you look at it—and I can’t bask in the detached feeling. Nova’s got me preoccupied. Her blue eyes are red as hell, her pupils glossy, and I can tell she’s struggling to keep her eyelids open. I don’t like how caught up I am—how worried I am about her. I get high so I don’t have to worry or think, but somehow she’s more powerful than the drugs, but what I’d like to figure out is why. What makes her so different? What makes her so consuming?

I tried to talk her out of smoking the joint. The old Quinton—the good, sober one—would have snatched it right out of her hand, because it’s obvious she’s never smoked weed before and she’s doing it to cover up something. But I’m too far gone, and before I know it Tristan, Nova, and I are squished on the couch, sharing a king-sized bag of Doritos, staring at the movements on the cracked computer screen as the screen saver dances to the beat of the music.

“Do you think it’s trying to tell us something?” Nova asks with a dazed look on her face as she analyzes the pink-and-green streams on the screen.

Tristan snorts a laugh as he grabs a handful of Doritos and drops them into his mouth; half of them fall onto his lap. “Yeah, that we should stop assessing lights on the screen.”

I have my arm draped on the back of the couch and Nova’s hair is scattered on my skin. “I think it’s trying to coexist with the lyrics.”

She brings her lip in between her teeth as she glances up at me. “That’s insightful.”

Normally, when a girl looks at me the way she’s looking at me, I’d take her back to my room and lose track of time for a little while. But the good inside me is conflicting with the bad, and I can’t seem to bring myself to say anything to her.

“Not insightful,” I say. “Just thoughts.”

She nods, like she gets what I’m saying, but how could she, because I’m not even making sense to myself. “Do your thoughts ever get jumbled in your head?” she wonders, rubbing at her eyes with her fingertips.