“Whoa, Lex, wait!” Seth’s coming up behind me as I raise my foot and kick at the door hard. It crashes open on the first try, the cheap particle board door splintering, and I push into the room, Damian’s name on my lips.

He’s there.

He’s sitting at his desk in his boxers, staring at me, his mouth fallen open. The music is so loud around us I can’t hear anything else. I stand there, chest heaving, staring.

Slowly he reaches up and turns off the speakers.

I feel like I’ve gone deaf. “Damian,” I manage to get out. “You’re alive.”

“Uh,” Seth pipes up from behind me. “I’ll be outside, ’kay?”

Damian closes his eyes and opens then again slowly, like he must be hallucinating the sight of me.

I’m so happy to see him alive that I can’t help but smile.

“So,” I say after a minute. “This is awkward.”

He scratches at the side of his neck. “Can you turn around or close your eyes or something so I can put my pants on?”

“Sure.” I clap a hand over my eyes.

“Not that I haven’t fantasized about a situation like this,” he says. I hear the whisper of denim, the zip of a fly. “Okay.”

I lower my hand. He sits down on the end of his bed and puts on a T-shirt and socks. He motions for me to sit in the desk chair where he was sitting a minute ago.

I sit.

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s start with, what are you doing here, Lex?”

“You weren’t at school today.”

“I was sick,” he explains.

“You don’t look sick.”

His face is turning red. “I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to see you. Okay?”

I nod. “I was worried about you.”

“Why?”

“I read your poem.”

His eyes brighten. “You read my poem.” He tries to keep his voice steady, casual. “What did you think?”

“I thought you might . . . I thought you were feeling so bad that you . . .”

Finally he understands. “You thought I’d be like Ty. And Patrick.”

I let out a breath. “Yes.”

His watery eyes meet mine. He brushes his hair out of his eyes and leans forward, settling his weight onto his knees. “I’m not like Ty and Patrick,” he says very slowly, like he wants to be sure I understand every word. “I don’t want to die. Things can get bleak sometimes, at school. There are bullies, right?”

“The carrion few,” I supply.

He glances away, laughs weakly. “Right. But I don’t have it in me to . . . It’s just high school, man. Those guys are just high school guys, and in ten years they’re going to be working for people like me. I know that. I have to make it through two more years, and then I’ll be home free. I swear, I couldn’t ever do what Ty did. I would never.”

He takes a deep breath and lets it out. “I’m sorry if my poems made you think I would.”

“I’m sorry that I inspired one of those poems,” I reply.

I feel something sharp in my pocket, poking into my hip. I remember what it is and pull it out.

Ty’s shark necklace.

I hold it out to Damian. “Here. I found this.”

He takes it and fingers the edge of the tooth gently. Suddenly there are tears in his eyes.

“I should have told you,” he says. “I’ve been working up to it, but I didn’t know how.”

“Told me what?”

He swallows. “Ty called me, the night he died.”

It feels like my heart’s stopped beating, but I know it hasn’t. If my heart stopped beating I would die. But here I sit, alive. Breathing. Listening.

Damian’s voice wavers as he keeps talking. “I knew that Ty sometimes thought about . . . what he did. Two years ago, the first time he tried, with the pills, he told me afterwards.”

“He told you?” I never knew that Ty told anyone.

“We were playing this song by the Doors—‘The End’—and he told me. I said, you know, we can talk about how things suck and how our parents are assholes and how the future isn’t exactly super bright, but I still think life’s worth living, don’t you? And he said, yeah, he knew that. And I said that if he ever felt that way again, like ending it, that he should call me. And he said he would.”

“And he called you,” I whisper. “You talked to him.”

Damian nods. “But he didn’t say anything that night about wanting to die. It wasn’t that unusual for him to call me, actually, not so unusual that I thought anything was up. We’ve kept in touch, even though we don’t hang out much at school. He calls—he called me sometimes and we’d talk about how life blows and people are morons and how most people don’t understand what it’s like when your life just goes to crap and there’s nothing you can do about it. He read my poems sometimes, too. So that’s what we talked about that night. The same old stuff.”

He shakes his head. “I should have known something was wrong. He’d just broken up with Ashley, and he was low; he seemed like he was stuck in his own head, and I should have figured out that something was off.” He snuffles. “I’ve thought about it so many times since then, been over the entire conversation back and forth, looking for clues that I should have picked up, but . . . sometimes I think he just called me to say goodbye.”