He stopped on the third step. He didn’t turn around.
“She laughed,” he said. “At my clothes. In front of everyone.”
“Was she alone?”
“No. Tyler and his friends were there. She only laughed at what I was wearing. They went after everything else — my face, my body, my weight. Tyler was the one who got everyone looking at me in the first place.”
He didn’t lift a bite.
Then his door closed gently, which was somehow worse than a slam.
I stood at the bottom of the stairs with a hundred questions lined up in my throat. Upstairs, I heard him sit down on his bed. And I didn’t go up.
****
Freshman year kept unraveling in ways I pretended not to see.
Lucas came home each afternoon and went straight to his room. The oversized hoodie stayed on even at dinner.
