Chapter 1 the next door again

I had rehearsed being normal for three weeks.

I had practiced in the bathroom mirror, in the shower, and once, embarrassingly, out loud in my car in the grocery store parking lot. *Hey, man. Good to see you.* Casual. Easy. The kind of thing a guy says to a friend he's known his whole life and definitely doesn't think about at two in the morning.

So of course, when the beat-up blue Jeep came roaring around the corner of Alder Street with its music loud enough to rattle the windows of the whole block, every line I'd prepared left my head like birds off a wire.

"Jaden Cole!"

Kris hung out of the driver's window with one hand on the wheel and the other waving like he was trying to land a plane. His sunglasses were pushed up into his hair, which was longer than I remembered and more golden, like he'd spent the whole summer in the sun on purpose just to make a point.

"Oh no," I muttered.

"I *heard* that!" he yelled, even though I was thirty feet away and had said it into my own collar.

I stood on the porch of the crooked yellow duplex I'd been renting since August and wondered if it was too late to go back inside and pretend I had died.

---

Kristopher Bennett had lived next door to me from the day I turned six until the summer we were fifteen.

That's the short version. The long version is a chain-link fence with one loose corner that we bent back and forth until it became a door. It's a treehouse we built out of stolen pallet wood and pure stubbornness. It's two boys sitting on my roof every July night, counting satellites and arguing about whether the blinking ones were planes.

He was the loud one. I was the one who caught whatever he threw.

When his dad took a job in Arizona, Kris cried in my driveway and pretended he hadn't. I stood there with my hands in my pockets and told him it was fine, that Arizona wasn't that far. It was, in fact, one thousand seven hundred miles. I knew because I'd looked it up that night, alone in my room, with the window open toward a dark house that had stopped being his.

After that, there were only holidays. A week at Christmas. Two weeks in the summer if our parents could swing it. Phone calls that started out long and slowly got shorter as we got older, then turned into texts, then memes, then the occasional *thinking of u, weirdo* at midnight that I read a hundred times more than a message like that deserved.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I figured something out about myself, and about him, that I had no idea what to do with.

So I did nothing. I was extremely good at nothing.

---

"You *lived*," Kris said, and then he was out of the Jeep and across the lawn and I barely had time to brace before he hit me.

He hugged like he did everything, with his whole body and zero warning. He picked me clean off the porch step, spun me half a circle, and set me down again while I made a noise that I will never, under any circumstance, acknowledge.

"Put me down," I said, several seconds too late.

"You got taller."

"You got louder."

"That's not possible."

"It's really, really possible."

He laughed, and there it was, that bright, ridiculous laugh I'd been hearing in my head for four years. It sounded exactly the same. Somehow that was worse.

He stepped back and looked at me properly, hands still on my shoulders. His eyes were the same, that warm, stormy brown that always looked like he was about to say something he shouldn't. There was a new scar through his left eyebrow. His jaw was sharper. He'd gotten older in ways I had only seen through a phone screen.

"Look at you," he said. "Junior year. Dean's list. Still wearing the same kind of sweater your grandma would pick."

"It's a good sweater."

"It's a *great* sweater." He grinned. "I missed you, Jay."

Nobody else called me Jay. Nobody had since he left.

"Yeah," I said, and my voice did something strange in the middle. I cleared my throat and stared at the Jeep. "You, um. You've got a lot of stuff."

"I've got *some* stuff."

"Kris. There's a lamp strapped to the roof."

"It's a very good lamp."

---

Here's what I knew about how Kris had ended up at Ridgemont University, in the same small college town as me, two hours from where we grew up.

One: he'd spent two years at a school in Tucson, where he'd played club soccer, made about four hundred friends, and, according to his mom, "figured out what he doesn't want."

Two: he'd transferred here in a rush over the summer. When I asked why, he said "fresh start" in a voice that told me to stop asking.

Three: his campus housing had fallen through at the last minute. Some paperwork disaster, a lottery system, a very tired administrator named Linda who, per Kris, "hated joy."

Four, and this was the one I was still having trouble with: three days ago, when he called me in a panic asking if I knew anyone with a spare room, I had heard myself say, "I have one."

I don't know who said it. It certainly wasn't the guy who'd been practicing being normal.

---

We hauled his boxes up the narrow stairs in the heat, and Kris narrated the entire thing.

"Nice place," he said, ducking under the low ceiling of the landing. "Very cozy. Very *vintage*."

"It's a duplex."

"It's a *character-building* duplex." He kicked open the door of the empty bedroom with his foot and dropped the box he was carrying with a thud. "Oh, this is great. Look at that window. Is that a radiator? Does it work?"

"Sometimes."

"Love that for us."

*Us.* I set down the lamp very carefully.

The room had been empty since my old roommate Devin moved out in June. I'd cleaned it. I'd vacuumed twice. I'd bought new sheets, plain gray, and then panicked and returned them, then bought them again. There was a small desk by the window. I had pretended for days that I hadn't picked the desk because it caught the afternoon light.

Kris turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. Then he stopped and looked at me, and his face went unexpectedly soft.

"Jay. Seriously. Thank you. I don't know what I would've done."

"You'd have slept in the Jeep."

"Probably. I'd have been very dramatic about it." He flopped onto the bare mattress and stared up at the ceiling. "Everything's kind of a mess right now. I didn't want to tell you over the phone. But you're the only person I could've called."

Something in my chest tightened like a fist.

"What kind of a mess?"

He went quiet, and for one long second the loud, glittering, unstoppable Kristopher Bennett looked like the fifteen-year-old in my driveway.

Then he grinned, bright and sudden, and the moment folded away like it had never been there.

"Boring stuff. Tell you later. Right now, feed me. I'm starving."

I let it go. That was the thing I was good at.

---

We ended up on the front steps at dusk with a large pizza between us and the boxes still half-unpacked upstairs. The neighborhood was going gold and blue. Somewhere down the street a dog was barking at nothing, and a couple of freshmen were dragging a mattress along the sidewalk, arguing.

Kris ate with his feet up on the railing, talking with his mouth full. He told me about Tucson, about the roommate who kept a pet lizard named Gerald, about a road trip that had ended with a flat tire in the middle of a desert at two in the morning. I laughed at all the right places. I asked all the right questions.

Underneath it, quiet and steady like a second heartbeat, I kept noticing things.

The way his knee bumped mine when he laughed and he didn't move it away.

The way he still tore the crust off his pizza first and saved it for last, exactly like he did when we were eight.

The way he glanced over at me every so often, almost checking, like he was making sure I was still real.

"What?" he said, catching me looking.

"Nothing."

"You've got your thinking face on."

"I don't have a thinking face."

"You have the *most* obvious thinking face. Your eyebrows do a thing." He nudged my shoulder. "Come on. Say it."

For one dangerous second I nearly did. It was right there behind my teeth, four years and a thousand unsent messages wide.

*I'm glad you're back.*

*I never stopped waiting.*

*Please don't look at me like that if you don't mean it.*

"I'm just," I said, and picked at the label on my soda bottle, "glad you're here. That's all."

Kris was quiet. It was a real quiet, the kind he almost never let happen. When I finally risked a look, he was watching me with an expression I couldn't read.

"Yeah," he said, softer than I'd heard him all day. "Me too, Jay."

And then, just as fast, he bumped my shoulder again, grabbed the last slice, and said, "Okay, real talk. Is there Wi-Fi? Because I have a *lot* of shows to catch up on."

The moment closed. I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding and laughed along.

---

Much later, after the dishes and the boxes and a long argument about where the lamp should go, I lay in my bed and stared at the ceiling.

Through the thin wall, I could hear him moving around. Drawers opening. A soft thud. A muffled, off-key hum that I would have known anywhere.

Four years I had spent building a nice, neat, sensible wall between the two of us. *We're friends. We've always been friends. It's just a habit of the heart, and habits fade.* I'd told myself that so many times that I'd nearly believed it.

Then he'd hugged me on my own porch, and the whole wall had come down in about two seconds.

"Goodnight, Jay!" he called through the wall.

I pressed my palm over my eyes.

"Goodnight, Kris."

A pause. Then, quieter, like he thought I wouldn't hear it:

"It's really good to be home."

I lay very still in the dark, my heart pounding like an idiot, and understood with perfect clarity that I was in enormous trouble.

He hadn't meant *my* home. He'd meant *here*, the town, the fresh start, whatever mess he'd left behind.

I knew that.

It didn't stop me from lying awake until the sky went gray, listening to him breathe on the other side of the# Chapter 1

## The Boy Next Door (Again)