I said nothing, even as he sat next to me on the swing, filling in the space where Riley had been, seconds ago.

Not a trace of her remained but her faint smile lingered in my memories, as would the smell of rain on the earth the morning after a downpour.

Avan glanced at me and I looked away, wishing he hadn't been there long enough to hear all my childish complaints. Maybe the brisk wind that rattled the chains of the swing had been loud enough to muffle my voice.

Night was falling and I could only hope the darkness concealed my expression the same way it hid his. Maybe he hadn't even seen me.

"Hey," he said.

'Hey'. That's it. That was a fairly ordinary word; maybe he hadn't heard me after all. I held on tightly to the silly hope that I could salvage whatever was left of my pride.

"Do you want to talk about it?" he asked, mercilessly crushing every last bit of optimistic thought in my head.

No, of course I didn't want to talk about it! "Sure," I heard myself answer.

I clutched the soft cushion on the swing to gather the strength necessary to hold this conversation. "I was just, uh, well, thinking out loud. I'm sorry you had to hear this. I just—" Where were all the words I had spent years learning now that I needed them? "I don't even know how to explain it. Something just feels off about seeing you with someone else."

An awkward silence settled between us as he scrutinized me without saying a word. I didn't stare back and pretended I couldn't feel his gaze even though it seemed to bore through my skin.

I watched my cracked and bitten fingernails drum on a fluffy throw pillow, in dire need of a distraction. A large V was written in calligraphy and embroidered with interwoven loops of gold yarn strands.

My hand brushed over the stunning pattern and I tried to forget whose initial it probably was.

Why was I even still here? Maybe if I slowly backed away and sneaked back inside, he wouldn't notice.

"Victoria and I are just friends," he said without elaborating.

I supposed he answered with a similar sentence to Riley when the rumors first started. The simplicity of the sentence was both admirable and irritating. The truth could always stand alone without tortuous explanations but my inquisitive spirit yearned for better answers.

"I know," I said, then words that I wasn't even aware I was pondering slipped past my lips against my own will. "Seeing you two just unsealed in my mind the possibility that you may eventually move on. I know you deserve to and maybe some part of me hopes that you will. However, I can't help but think that if we move on, she will truly be gone. I don't know. I feel like she's alive in these memories I revisit daily and the second I stop thinking about them, she will die."

The same way I used to live off her stories, it now seemed like my memories were the only thing keeping her alive.

He shifted on his seat to face me and the swing inched forward with a protesting creak.

I finally dared to look at him. The dim light of the porch's lantern highlighted his dark hair with a soft glint. Something inside me ached at the broken eyes that stared back at me.

"Even if I did ever move on," he said, "even if I could, I would never forget her. Everything about her is sketched in stone in my mind. She's as much a part of me now as she was back then, eleven months ago. We exist together; she won't die until I do."

An irrepressible smile etched across my lips at the thought. 'Did you hear that, Riley?'

They were soulmates, after all, regardless of how many times she would vehemently protest against my word choice.

"Soulmates? What a ridiculous idea!" she would say with a dismissive wave of her hand. "No, Avan and I weren't predestined to be together. We are not each other's sole options and maybe it's even more special that way. We get to make the conscious decision to choose each other every single day."

"But for future reference," Avan said with a mocking smile, interrupting my euphoric mental dance routine. "If you must assume that I'm dating, pair me with someone who doesn't already have a boyfriend. As much as I hate to admit it, getting punched sucks."

"I didn't know she did."

"Well, it's complicated. I don't know all the details." He shrugged.

"So, you did get punched today." I tried to find any other clue on his face besides the cut on his lip.

"Hey! I also punched him," he said with a small smile. "Not that fighting is anything to be proud of." His expression visibly darkened. "This one just deserved it."

In my mind, I thanked him for defending her and wondered if I would have.

➷➷➷➷➷➷➷➷➷➷➷➷➷➷➷

If Victoria and Ryder's relationship was indeed complicated, it was a simple addition compared to the intricate equations of Arson and Brooklyn's.

As he spoke to Matthew about the team, his eyes hovered towards Brooklyn and they exchanged strange, unreadable looks he couldn't seem to understand either.

I leaned back in my usual seat in the very last row, and unfortunately, it allowed me to see everything in the room except whatever Mr. Andrews was scribbling on the board.

"It's only the four of us left," Arson told Matthew. "Our school, Northwood, Marvin Ridge, and Pine Lake. I think we're facing Pine Lake next, but we should check with Coach later at practice," he said and glanced at Brooklyn doodling shapes on the cover of her book, occasionally tapping the desk with her free hand in a steady beat.

"I—" Arson seemed to rack his brain to regain his train of thought. "Oh, I saw that the guys have been giving Jimmy a hard time because he's a sophomore. We'll need to do something about that."

Matthew nodded but looked ready to doze off.

"What are you doing?" Arson asked, turning to Brooklyn. "You're distracting me."

"That's exactly why I'm doing it," she joked with a grin, leaning slightly towards his desk. "I'm trying to get your attention."

"You already have it," he mumbled to himself.

His face betrayed his confusion about the ambiguity of their relationship. I struggled not to intervene and reminded myself that this was none of my business.

"Do you think they realize that we're in class and that they're not alone?" Jayce whispered next to me and shook her head.

Jayce and Henry might have been the only ones truly listening to Mr. Andrews but he didn't seem to mind. He spoke directly to the few attentive faces and tried to ignore the rest.

"They've tuned us out a long time ago," I whispered back, watching Brooklyn steal glances his way.

The class period ended and the students filed out of the room, leaving it in a jumbled chaos of chairs I was eager to align.

"How's the reading going?" Mr. Andrews asked as I stepped to the back of the room to get a better look at the room to know how to best organize it.

"I only have the literature textbook left to finish."

"What do you think about it so far?"

I didn't know what was the polite way to point out that I had no idea what the words I read meant. While I enjoyed reading the poems and excerpts, all the formal literary interpretations went over my head.

"Interesting." I smiled sheepishly. "It's been an interesting resource so far."

He narrowed his eyes in a dubious expression but didn't comment on my suspicious reply. He waved me over to his desk and I reluctantly walked to him, staring back at the disordered seats.

He pointed at a paper on his desk where a B and his signature smiley face were scrawled by my name. The essay I had written a few days ago was now covered with red annotations of Mr. Andrews's nearly illegible handwriting.

"This is some fascinating reflection on the purpose of psychology," he said. "The only problem is that you barely scraped your thesis in the development. Spending just a few more minutes to refine this would have made it a terrific work."

I stood by his desk, and stared at the neat letters of my handwriting, barely registering any of the words.

"I want you to try this again." He handed the paper back to me. "Not for a grade. I just think you've missed the extent of your understanding of psychology. If you spend a while longer contemplating the topic, I believe you could even surprise yourself with what you come up with."

I hesitantly skimmed the paper. I could see by the unconnected and irrelevant sentences that I had not spent much time working on it. I didn't spend much time working on anything. School had dropped from my priorities and my grades had suffered from it.

I nodded, feeling a bit guilty that I could have disappointed the most caring teacher I had met so far. He gave me a reassuring smile with no hint of disapprobation in his eyes.

So, I pondered over the use of psychology all morning up until lunch.

Surprisingly, Avan joined Arson and me at our table. Even yesterday night, we had spent a lot of time together at Victoria's party and in my driveway before I finally went in. We were awkwardly teetering towards each other, attracted like broken magnets to the fragments of my sister left in both of us.

Brooklyn and Jayce also joined us and soon, we were a little crowd. Even as we chatted together, we seemed to be doing entirely different things in our minds without realizing it. That distanced us, no matter how united we looked.

As I spoke to Avan and Jayce, I reminisced about the first time Arson sat at this table, back when it was still a two-person table. Jayce frequently glanced at the cheerleading squad's table toward the back of the room. Arson's eyes unconsciously moved to his injured hand even as he cheerfully talked to Brooklyn.

We were barely listening to each other and we didn't realize it.

I watched Arson and Brooklyn's usual banter and there was nothing out of the ordinary about it until something shifted in his previously playful expression.

"What is this?" he asked her out of the blue.

"What is what?"

He motioned to the space in between them with a flick of his left wrist. "What is this thing between us? I know you feel it too," he said though the uncertainty in his eyes showed that he didn't know for sure. "But you're dating Bradley, right?"

It was more of a rhetorical question and Brooklyn did not seem to know how to answer it.

'The truth. Tell him the truth,' I tried to tell her via telepathy but she didn't seem to have heard, and screaming it out loud would breach my vow not to intervene.

But Brooklyn didn't. She simply nodded, either to the assumption that she felt it too or to the question about her relationship status. I don't think she knew what she meant either, but Arson guessed it meant that she was indeed dating his teammate and politely let it go.

An understanding of relationship counseling would have been handy at this point because despite what I had argued in my essay earlier, psychology had a purpose of even more value than to help us understand others. It could clear up our misunderstandings of ourselves.

So much about our behavior flew right over our heads, unnoticed. I had not realized how little we understood about ourselves until I observed my friends. All these small unconscious things we did revealed something about us: Jayce's affection for her old squad, Arson's self-consciousness about his injury, Brooklyn's fear of any consequential relationship, Avan's perception of my sister in me, and my obsession with the past.

I knew then why Mr. Andrews seemed to believe this was such an important assignment for me.

A/N: Thank you so much for reading!

Fun fact, I spend more time debating which picture to choose than writing the actual chapter.

--This would be funny if it wasn't so true.

-D.T. ➷