“I didn’t kill your brother, Indy.”
“Then just tell me, Kier!”
“I killed someone else!” he shouted, and then grabbed at his hair, turning to look at the bedroom door before dropping his elbows to his knees—his hands still firmly gripping his thick black hair.
I was frozen. I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t blink. That—that couldn’t be right. I must have misheard him. Because the Kier I’d come to know wasn’t a—I couldn’t even think it. Not because it was too terrifying a thought, but because it didn’t fit what I knew of him at all.
“What?” I finally choked out. “You—no.”
When Kier looked back up at me, his eyes were glassy and tortured. “I didn’t pull the trigger, but I made him do it.”
The fistlike vise that had been tightening on my chest slowly started letting up, and I blew out a deep breath. “What do you mean?”
“A guy from my school committed suicide because of me.”
My heart sank. “Kier, no. No, I don’t know what happened, but you can’t think that—”
“Indy, it was in his note. I was the reason he did it. Cops questioned me, they showed me the note, his parents—fuck, his dad put me in the hospital when I walked out of the police station that day.”
“But it was his decision—”
“Stop.” He raked his hands down his face and leaned forward, only to sit back in the chair again. “You know how you always told me that I was quiet? That I don’t talk?” When I nodded, he asked, “Did you think it was because I was shy, or . . .”
I shrugged. “No, you didn’t seem shy, just like you didn’t want to talk. Like what everyone was doing was bothering you in a way.”
He huffed and shook his head. “I was popular in high school. I was the quarterback of our football team. I was dating the hottest girl in school. My parents gave me anything I wanted and were never home anyway—so my house was always the party house. I don’t think anyone ever liked me. They liked what I was . . . if that makes sense. Rich, cocky, varsity QB . . . the whole bit. Everything back then was a label—it was dumb. But I was such a dick back then I wouldn’t even have liked me.”
I tried to see it, but I couldn’t. Kier was handsome in a way you only ever saw on silver screens, but he was always in the background, never letting anyone get close to him . . . except for me. And the kind of guy who was quiet and in the background was the exact opposite of who he was explaining now.
“I made fun of anyone who wasn’t ‘us’ basically, but there was this one kid, Alan Schwartz—God, I don’t know why, but I just wanted to ruin his life. He never did anything, he stayed away from me, shit, he’d run when he saw me . . . but I just had it out for him for some reason. Picked on him about everything. His weight, his looks, and the way he dressed—and it was constant. Every day, every time I saw him. I think because my buddies wanted to seem cool around me, or something, they all started picking on him, too, and soon he had half the football team after him. We’d have our girls put tampons in his locker. We’d steal his clothes during P.E. and sometimes replace them with girls’ clothes. And he wasn’t gay; we were just doing anything to embarrass the shit out of him. He started missing school, and that’s when I should have started realizing something was different about him. But I didn’t notice anything; I just kicked up embarrassing him on the days he was in school.
“Spring came, he kept wearing long sleeves . . . and now that it’s all over and I look back on that time, I remember how dead he looked. He didn’t cry anymore when we embarrassed him, he didn’t run away from me anymore, he just stared—like nothing mattered anymore. But when it was happening, I didn’t notice. I noticed the long sleeves, though, and, of course, I made fun of him for wearing those, too, when it was hot outside. Every. Day. Never. Stopping. I was on my way to my junior prom when I got a call from my parents saying that the police were looking for me, and that they would meet me at the station. Funny that I thought they were joking when they said the police were looking for me, but as soon as they told me they would meet me somewhere, I knew they were serious. My parents were never anywhere for me. They only care about themselves; there was always some party or resort they had to go to with colleagues or friends.
“I took my girlfriend to the prom, told her I would be back soon, and left. Alan had been cutting his wrists for months apparently, and that night, he shot himself. There was a letter on his bed addressed to me. Asking what he ever did to me to make me hate him, to torture him, and to make him wish he’d never been born. He said he’d tried to ignore me, then hoped I would see what I was doing to him, and then finally gave up . . . saying he couldn’t take it anymore. At the bottom, he wrote a line to his parents saying he loved them, and it wasn’t their fault—they did everything they could. It just wasn’t enough.”
“Kier,” I whispered, and had to swallow past the tightness in my throat. “I—I don’t know what to say.” The anguish in his voice as he retold the story couldn’t be faked. He hated himself for what had happened with Alan.
“I couldn’t even leave the room after that. I just lost it. Everything—everything I’d ever done came rushing back to me and I would have given anything to take it back. I wanted to die, I wanted it all to be a joke like they were just trying to give me a wake-up call for how I was ruining people’s lives, I wanted to apologize to Alan . . . I wanted to redo the previous three years all over again. But it wasn’t a joke,” he mumbled, and worked his jaw for a couple of minutes. “My dad’s attorney informed us that Alan’s parents were going to take us to court for a civil suit—since there wasn’t anything they could charge me with for picking on someone. My parents were still standing inside the building talking to their attorney when I walked outside. Alan’s parents were there and his dad attacked me, and I didn’t even try to stop him. I wanted to hurt, I wanted him to kill me, I wanted to take Alan’s place. By the time he was pulled off me, I was unconscious. I ended up in the hospital for a week because of it, and I felt like it hadn’t been anywhere near enough.
“But because of it, we never went to court because my parents could have actually pressed charges on him. While I was unconscious, they’d all agreed on no charges from either side . . . and my parents paid his parents off as way of an apology.” Kier looked up at me, his golden eyes dulled. “You can’t fucking pay someone for something like that. ‘Sorry our kid forced yours to pull the trigger. Here’s a hundred grand.’ Who the fuck does that?”
“Did Alan’s parents take it?”
“Yeah, and they started a foundation in Alan’s name. After that, I dropped out of football, stopped hanging out with my so-called friends. It wasn’t hard. Once I was off the team and stopped throwing parties, none of them talked to me again anyway. My girlfriend broke up with me because she said I was too different. No one even fucking cared about Alan. They were just pissed that they had to find a new place to get wasted every weekend. And that’s when I just stopped talking to people.” He shrugged and held my gaze.
“Because of Alan,” I said.
“Because my words had ended someone’s life. Because I was so self-absorbed that I couldn’t see when he needed someone to be there for him, when he was getting too low and was crying out for someone to bring him back up. I should have seen, and I just pushed him more.”
Kier dropped his head into his hands, and his shoulders shook as he cried silently. I stared at him for a few moments before finally crawling off the bed to stand in front of him. Lifting his head with my hands, I placed a soft kiss on his lips and dropped my forehead onto his.
“Don’t say it wasn’t my fault,” he pled.
“I won’t. I’m also not going to say it was your fault. It just . . . was,” I breathed.