I didn’t know what to say.
“Stay,” I said finally.
So he stayed. He didn’t say anything for a while. He just sat there while I cried.
When I was done, he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a handkerchief. A real cloth handkerchief, gray,
with a little sawdust on it.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s clean. Mostly.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
That’s how it started.
After that, Edward started eating lunch in the library.
He said it was because the teachers’ lounge was too loud. I think it was because of me.
Every day, he’d come in at 11:45 with a paper bag and sit at the table in the back. Sometimes we talked. Sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes he’d bring me half of his sandwich because he said he’d made too much. (He always made too much. Every single day.)
He listened. That was the thing about Edward. He actually listened.
I told him about Max. About the gym and the trainer and the texts. About the night at the kitchen table. About the mirror.
When I told him about the mirror, he set his sandwich down.
“He said that?” Edward said
quietly. “When was the last time you even looked at yourself in the mirror?”
“Yes.”
Edward didn’t say anything for a long time. He just looked at the table. I saw his jaw move.
“And you believed him,” he said.
“I looked,” I said. “He was right.”
Edward looked up at me.
“Hannah,” he said. “No. He wasn’t.”
That was all he said. He didn’t make a speech. He didn’t tell me I was beautiful or any of the things people say when they want you to stop crying.
He just said, “He wasn’t,” like it was a fact. Like the sky is blue. Like water is wet.
I thought about that sentence for weeks.
Edward knew about the girls too. He’d met them a few times. At school events. At a spring carnival where June threw up a whole funnel cake on his shoes and he just laughed and
