☽ Peter ☽

The moss is damp under my hands, streaking droplets on my sleeve. The water sliding between my fingers is a metallic grey, unlike the transparent surface of the stream in front of me. The sound of the forest—the leaves swishing, the wind gusting—is one of the sole sensory experiences that I don't hate.

I take a sip of water to cure my parched throat and return to the task at hand. During my first few sessions with Suzanna, she instructed me to make a boat. A simple piece of wood will do, she told me, as long as it floats. You can give it as much or as little thought as you want. You can paint it, if that makes it easier. Give it a name, and a pair of sails. The important part is to let it symbolize your feelings, and then to let them go.

Dad gave me the driftwood. He said nothing about it; he didn't give me the usual spiel about what real men do. (Throwing me into the pool to teach me how to swim is called flooding in psychology, and it may be the technique he would use, but I would drown, and I think he understands that.)

It doesn't mean that I don't feel a tad silly, holding a deformed piece of driftwood shaped like an L, or maybe a V, if I hold it at an angle. But I set it on the stream nevertheless, and I watch it as it floats across the rocks, transported by the bubbling arctic blue, absorbing my worries and fading from view.

It would take a lot of trees for me to feel relieved; endless hectares of clear-cut that I would have to send out into the North Atlantic ocean, doomed to drift forever.

I pick up my glass and trudge back to the cabin. Taking my seat on the couch with my parents, my mother squeezes me on the shoulder. "Want to put another log on the fire?"

☆ ☽ ☆

Throughout the week, I catch sight of Claire from afar. Most of the time, she's accompanied by a group of girls that I recall seeing at the soccer game. What strikes me as odd, though, is that she isn't with Evan.

He's suspiciously absent in the hallways and has seemingly left his usual lunchtime spot empty. Claire leaves it that way—on purpose, it seems—a blank spot where she assumes Evan will arrive.

But he doesn't, and by the time Thursday rolls around, I can guess that he won't show up.

Nicole comes barrelling into the club room first, draping her hands around me. She says, "I have good news."

"You passed your English test?" The final word is strained as she grapples her hands around my neck, almost unthinkingly.

She grins, dropping her iron grip to spin around the circle of desks. "What? Oh, yeah, that was today. But that's not good news. I still don't know what a preposition is. My news is that I applied to the University of Toronto!"

"What do you mean, you don't know what a preposition is?" I ask teasingly. "Seriously though, I'm proud of you, for someone who used to say you would never apply because universities should reach out to the students if they want anyone to come."

"I still think that's the smartest idea I've ever come up with," she replies.

I glance back at the timetable in front of me. I've planned out the club events for the next few weeks, a task that Evan was meant to help me with.

The door creaks as it opens, and I look towards the noise, expecting Jay and Lexa. It takes me a moment to recognize Dina, as she isn't wearing the Lotus apron I usually see her with. But she stands in the partition, her hands clasped.

"I hope I'm not late," Dina says, her voice soft. "I wanted to see how your club was going." Taking a wary step into the room, Dina smiles at Nicole. "What?"

"Nothing, I'm just surprised that Peter has friends other than me." Nicole returns the bright grin and gestures for her to take a seat.

"What are we doing today?" Dina asks lightly.

Nicole shrugs. I say: "We're waiting for our remaining club members."

"Lexa's doing an extra assignment for calculus, so I don't think they're coming. The troubles of being a smart person," Nicole tells me.

My pencil taps against my paper as I consider this. "Maybe they can explain how limits work when they come, because I'm stressed."

After punching me on the shoulder, Nicole rolls her eyes. "Stressed by math homework, or just in general?"

"It's like you don't know me at all."

She swings her legs onto the table. The desk shakes like a shock wave, smearing pencil lines across the page. "What are you doing, anyway?" Nicole asks.

"Planning that movie night we wanted to do. I couldn't remember if we'd decided on a place." Evan brought it up in the group chat again, but then his texts stopped the morning after I called him. And I know correlation doesn't always equal causation, but it's pretty safe to say that the two events are related.

"You could do it at the hotel," Dina suggests.

Nicole purses her lips in an expression I've seen before. We used to spend time at the hotel quite frequently until she realized that the majority of her days were spent waiting for me to come back from completing tasks. "There's never a dull moment at the hotel," she says, after a beat. "Armageddon could come and your parents would usher you outside and send you off to fix the... fucking elevator shaft or something, I don't know. I don't want to be given side quests to do on the weekend."

It makes me chuckle imagining that scenario. The image is particularly vivid in my mind, as I can see my parents shoving me out into a world with a charcoal-grey sky with a horde of monsters hiding around every corner, holding nothing but a baseball bat. (A textbook example of flooding, if there ever was one.) I follow the train of thought for a while until I shake myself out of running through the apocalypse scenario that I sometimes think about when I can't sleep. "Some of us are productive members of society. That being said, we certainly can't do it at school. It's really the lesser of two evils," I remind her.

She shrugs and relents.

☆ ☽ ☆

I finish my planning with half an hour to spare, so I head to the basement floor. It's desolate, as the only students down here are floating between the lockers, then returning to the upper floors. Nobody stays for long.

An old Astronomy Club poster sits on the wall next to the water fountain. The tape curls off the page; the poster is on the verge of falling to the ground. I pass it on my way to the bathroom, putting on my headphones to mitigate the effect of the harsh light. There's a blue tint to the edges of the bathroom mirror. It sits on an angle that places my reflection at the centre. I've seen Nicole shimmy backward to angle herself correctly, but I don't have that problem.

When I step back into the hall, heading towards my usual spot, I realize that it isn't empty. In the space I normally occupy, angrily pacing in circles, is Evan McKenna.

I take a tentative step forward and lower my headphones. The sound sharpens, and I catch what he's muttering.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck." Etcetera. He continues like this for a while, eyes turned to the floor as he scans the ground.

I don't have time to consider my options before he turns around. My instincts are screaming at me to move, but there's a shine to Evan's expression that keeps me planted in place. I don't know how he does that; how he can look lost, like he's invisible, and I'm the only person who can see him.

The exit sign behind him dowses Evan in red light—it makes his hair catch fire, giving his pale complexion an umber tone. "I dropped something," he explains. "I'm not going to find it. Right? Some fucking idea I had to take it off my key chain." As if to explain, he holds up his key ring. The gemstones stuck to his key collide with the pair of ice skates attached to it. I recognize it from his introduction sheet—the clock, a paintbrush, the hourglass, and the ice skates.

When I don't respond, he faces my hiding spot underneath the stairs. His voice is merely a whisper, like he has to detach a piece of himself to admit what comes next. "It doesn't matter. Peter, I was... I am an asshole. I said a lot of shit that I didn't mean, and I don't want to leave it like this."

"I don't think I am blameless. To be honest, I probably attacked you too quickly. I was burned once, and I don't want that to happen to me again," I admit.

He nods, motioning me to sit next to him. I insert myself into the space, with Evan against the stairwell. His shoulders are squared as he chews on his lip; the toe of his shoes pointing at the exit door. "I shouldn't have lied," he starts quietly. "It's not an excuse, but I've been doing that for a long time. It's... I don't fucking know what it is, actually. Lying is easier when I know I'm going to get in trouble for telling the truth. But you cornered me. And at that moment, I didn't want to deal with it. I didn't want to mess up, but I did anyway. At that moment, I really couldn't remember what I sent to the blog. It wasn't like I thought about that message for hours. It was in the heat of the moment. Can I tell you what I said?"

"Sure."

He sighs, setting his hand on his chin. "From what I remember, it was pretty silly. I apologized—I felt guilty, even though I never knew the full story of what happened. And then... then I wrote: Some things are not meant to be put into words." He stops himself to look at me. I'm not meeting his gaze; I'm using Suzanna's eye contact cheat, where I stare past his face, and my eyes bounce between the wall and the bridge of his nose. "This might be a bad idea, but can I read the other messages you got?"

"I don't see why not." I pass him my phone and he takes a long time to scroll through the anonymous questions from September. For the few questions I've glanced at, I can categorize them into three main groups. There are the insults from the hockey team, whose choice of words gives them away. Then, there are the students who joined in after the fact, who have no idea what occurred, and who send either extremely positive or extremely negative questions. And of course, there are my followers, who pepper my inbox, curiously wondering where the explosion came from, and demanding answers. Only users with an account can ask me questions now, and since then, I've not seen anyone from North High lurking around.

Evan's eyebrows furrow as he reads. The look deepens the longer he travels; I haven't looked at all the messages myself, but they're not personal attacks on Evan. I suppose it would be easier for him to detach himself, to grit his teeth and bear it. "These are... they're intense. I don't know how to begin to explain it. How could I possibly fix that? This is beyond terrible, and it makes me think about the Instagram post. There were two people mentioned."

"Two?" I say. There was a phone number next to my blog link; I erased it from the bathroom wall back then.

Evan nods solemnly. "Azan. He never left a comment. He never acknowledged it, either."

I am hit with a wave of unease so powerful that it nearly knocks me over. My memories of the party come cascading back, and I have to brace myself against it. Lucas picked me up in the afternoon; wearing a beanie with his brown hair peeking out. It was almost practiced, the way he spoke to me. I was too focused on anchoring myself from the oncoming anxiety attack to notice, too focused on taking deep breaths while I counted to ten. You know that you don't have to go out there. I don't know if you should.

"He tried to warn me," I murmur.

Evan watches me as I place my hands against my sides. "Okay, now I have a serious question. What Sam wrote... did you see it? What he, well, called you?"

"Right, you mean queer?" I have no reservations saying it, so Evan nods to confirm that I'm correct. "He could have used a worse word, that much is true. I think of it as a term to describe my identity, but it can also be used as a weapon. I've never personally used it, but I know Nicole—when she was questioning—used it as a label. Labels are just that, really—you use them if it fits. I don't fault anyone who does feel comfortable with it... it's not for me to dictate. I just use what I think defines me best. That's the most I can hope for, is that someone understands the difference in perspective. I admit I don't know why Sam chose to do it like that, but then again... maybe he doesn't know what it means. Maybe he understands it as an umbrella term because it can be one."

"You're being far too forgiving about this," Evan says.

I shrug and continue: "You know, Sam told me he had a brother. I don't know much about him, other than that he moved out the day he turned eighteen, and he tried to bring his boyfriend home last summer. Sam told me all about it, and maybe it was a lie, but maybe he really was trying to vent... trying to understand it. Anyway, I'm rambling, but his parents wouldn't let Noah stay with them. Which is odd, because they were perfectly fine with him when he had a girlfriend. I don't know how, but somehow I got caught up in that."

"What a mess," Evan mutters under his breath.

"You're right about that."

He shoots me an amused look. "That's an unusual phrase coming from you, Peter." He hands me back my phone. I realize he doesn't have his, and I wonder what happened to him this week.

I grin. "And it might be the only time you hear it. I am almost never wrong."