“Hey,” I said.
Brayden looked up. “H-hey.”
Instead of continuing on to the bathroom, I slid down onto one of the stools across from him. “You doing okay?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I’m okay. Just needed a few minutes. I feel… bad, out there.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “I was the biggest bitch in the world to these people, and it doesn’t feel fair that now I get to just have a pool party with them and have fun.”
Brayden popped a chip from his plate into his mouth. “Exactly.”
“We miss you out there, though. We’re supposed to be spending time together, all of us. We’ve all done shit wrong. I think we’ve committed ourselves to just pretending none of that shit ever happened. Looking forward, you know?”
“Yeah.” Something else hung on the end of Brayden’s voice. He kept shifting his eyes up to me, then away again, before finally bringing them up to land on me. “Hey… can I ask you a question? More of a favor?”
“Of course. Anything,” I replied.
“Can you not tell Nathan about…” His voice trailed off and his gaze slipped from mine. “The, uh, the kiss?”
“Oh.” I furrowed my brow, but nodded regardless. “Yeah. It’s not really my place to talk about.”
He lifted his brown eyes back to me. “Cool. Thanks.”
“Since we’re on the topic though, and I can use the fact that I have no fucking clue how to define my friendship with you as an excuse, can I ask. What’s up with you two? You and Kyle, I mean?”
Brayden got fidgety again immediately. “Um.”
“I mean, I don’t want to overstep, but you two seem so perfect for each other. And you know we’d all accept you, right? If you guys want to be more than—”
“We’re just friends,” Brayden said suddenly, and there was a shake in his voice that broke my heart. “He’s… Kyle is… I mean he…” He stammered a few more times trying to form a sentence, but then eventually just dropped it. “Yeah. We’re just friends.”
I got the sense that Brayden was very uncomfortable with the topic, and whether it was because he didn’t understand his own feelings, or was afraid of how others might take it, I wasn’t sure. “Okay. I’ll leave it there then.”
“Don’t tell him that I said that,” Brayden said. “The friends thing.”
Poor guy. He was in a house of mirrors and couldn’t get out. I knew that feeling all too well. “Let’s just say anything you and I discuss stays between us.”
He offered me a little smile then. “Thanks, Cherri.”
“Yeah,” and I stood up. “Well, I actually do have to pee, so I’m gonna go do that, but you should come back out. I want all my friends out there. Gus deserves to see the excellent people I get to call friends. Every single one of you.”
“I’ll go back out. I promise,” he replied.
“Cool.”
I turned to walk away, but then Brayden cleared his throat. “Hey, Cherri?”
“Yeah?” I looked back over my shoulder.
“Tomorrow, can we try again to find Connor using the driving blindfold method?” he asked.
At that question, I turned back around. “Listen, Brayden. We can find another way to do this. There’s no guarantee that we’d even figure anything out that way, and I’m not gonna fuck you up more in the brain for that. I appreciate that you’re willing, but we’ll do it another way.”
He shook his head, and I saw some determination flash into his eyes. “No! I want to do it. After we talked about it, I realized that Connor must have known… everything. He knew exactly what to tell me and he used me to hurt the one person who has always been there for me. Then he used me to hurt all of you guys. I don’t want him to get away with that. I want to fight back.”
I smiled. “That’s awesome, Brayden. You deserve that. If you aren’t comfortable, we’ll figure something else out, but if that’s what you wanna do, then we’ll do it.”
“Tomorrow,” he said with a nod. “Let’s do it.”
My smile grew. “Yeah. Let’s do it.”
Instead of the arrangement from the first time, we decided to leave Nikita and Jaxon behind for the second attempt. Everyone slept in after the pool party, and then I had to take Gus home, but not long after lunch, we met up to try the blindfold method again. We opted to take two different cars, so Kyle and Brayden rode in his car, while I rode with Avery in hers. We started at Postings Proper High School, and did the same thing we did the first time.
Avery wrapped Brayden up in a blindfold and put a hair tie around his wrists, then we led him over to Kyle’s truck the same way we did the first time, and put him in the back seat. We had a feeling Brayden would feel less pressured and more comfortable if it was just Kyle in the truck, so we left the two of them and climbed back in Avery’s car to follow behind.
After a few minutes, Kyle pulled away from the curb and Avery kept a close tail on them. Brayden must have felt something solid the first time we did the experiment, because around the same place that Brayden wanted to turn at the first time, was where Kyle turned right. Avery followed and every now and again, Kyle would turn, and eventually, we ended up on the highway that was taking us to North Postings.
“This is good, right?” Avery said. “Nikita and Jaxon found Brayden wandering around North Postings.”
“Yeah?” I said. “If that’s the case, then we could be on the right track for sure.”
At one point, Kyle got off the highway, and the turns got more erratic and uncertain. A few times, Kyle put on a blinker to turn, before turning it off and continuing straight. “What’s going on?” Avery asked.
Finally, Kyle’s car pulled over and stopped. We could see him looking over the backseat, talking to Brayden. About five minutes passed, and I was just about to climb out and walk over to the truck, when Kyle climbed out and walked back to Avery’s car.
Avery rolled down her window and Kyle leaned in. “Hey.”
“Is he panicking again?” I asked. “We can stop.”
“No, he’s fine. He’s going great, but we think he may have screwed up on the exit, he said he felt like it might have been too soon. I asked if he wanted to start over, but he said he thinks if we go back to the Posings Proper exit and get back on the highway, that he can get it right the second time. I’m gonna take Millworth back to the Postings Proper exit, and then get back on the highway and try again,” Kyle explained.
“Okay,” Avery said. “We’re behind you.”
“Cool.” He tapped the side of Avery’s car and then pulled back from the window and walked back to his truck.
“Hopefully, the third time’s the charm,” Avery said.
“Hopefully,” I agreed.
Exactly as Kyle had said, he took Millworth, a street that ran all the way from South Postings, through Postings Proper, and into North Postings, back to the highway exit we’d started on. He hesitated for a moment, likely allowing Brayden to reset and focus, and then eventually he got back on the highway. We drove down the highway following Kyle, but that second run, he got in the left lane. We passed the exit we got off on, along with a couple more, and we were fast approaching the final exit for North Postings—a left exit—but then Kyle got off.