She thought about it for about a mile.
“You still paid for it though,” she said.
“That’s not the same as saying it out loud.”
“No,” she said. “But you didn’t ask me for anything.”
Daniel gave me the bracelet back in November. He’d picked it up off the picnic table that day after everyone left, and he’d been carrying it in the console of his truck for five months.
He didn’t make a speech about it. He put it on the table at a diner on Ferrin and said, “This is yours. I’m not asking for anything,” and then he asked me whether Ava should do driver’s ed in the spring or wait, because that is what we are now, two people who run one girl’s calendar.
I didn’t put it on. I keep it in a dish on my dresser and I look at it most mornings, and what I think about is not Daniel.
What I think about is a sixteen-year-old girl standing on a deck with her chin up and her right hand shaking against her leg, screaming the truest sentence anyone said in that backyard all day.
Don’t ever touch me again.
She said it to the wrong person. She had been saying it for eleven months and nobody had heard it once.
