I let her finish. And while she talks, I'm turning over everything that doesn't fit.
The boy on the boat who looked at my face when I was standing there in a soaked shirt, and kept looking at my face, when every other boy at this school would have looked anywhere but. The boy in the doorway of the equipment room who got the door open somehow, got me out, and said you owe me a favor like it had cost him nothing at all, when I could see it had cost him something. The fist in the air last night. Coming down slow. Stopping.
None of it matches the story she's telling me. And that's exactly the problem. If Evan were only the rumor, I could file him under trouble and forget him and go back to my life. It's the pieces that don't fit the rumor that kept me on that back step at dawn.
"I hear you,
