CHAPTER 8 - ANONYMOUS

The messages didn't stop.

Ezra told himself he'd block the number the first night. He told himself the same thing the second night, and the third. By the end of the week, he'd stopped pretending he meant it.

There was something dangerous about talking to someone who already knew the worst of it. Someone who didn't ask him to explain, who never demanded he justify why he still watched Jace Ryland the way he did after three years of being nothing but a joke to him. It was easier to be honest with a stranger than with anyone who actually had to look at him the next day.

**Unknown: How was school?**

**Ezra: Same as always.**

**Unknown: That bad?**

**Ezra: Logan Pierce called me "project charity case" in front of half the cafeteria. Jace didn't say anything.**

**Unknown: Did you expect him to?**

Ezra stared at that one a long time before answering.

**Ezra: No. I don't know. Maybe.**

**Unknown: That's the part that hurts, isn't it? Not the joke. Him staying quiet.**

Ezra's throat tightened. It was exactly the part that hurt, and he hadn't said it that plainly even to himself.

**Ezra: Yeah.**

**Unknown: You still went to the library with him yesterday though.**

**Ezra: We have a project.**

**Unknown: That's not the only reason and you know it.**

He didn't answer that one.

At school the next day, Sophie slid into the seat beside him at lunch and stole a fry off his tray without asking, same as always.

"You've been on your phone a lot," she said. "Like, suspicious amounts. Are you finally texting a girl?"

"No."

"A boy?"

Ezra choked on absolutely nothing.

Sophie grinned, delighted. "Oh my god. It's a boy."

"It's nobody. It's just .... someone I talk to. I don't even know who they are."

"So you're getting emotionally attached to a mystery number." She nodded slowly, like a doctor delivering bad news. "Ezra, that's how three different true crime documentaries start."

"It's not like that."

"Sure. And I'm not stealing another fry right now." She stole another fry. "Just, you know. If 'anonymous friend' turns out to be a 45-year-old man named Gary, I want full credit for warning you."

Despite himself, Ezra laughed .... the first real one all day.

"Noted," he said. "I'll put it on Gary's tombstone."

"Excellent planning."

Some nights it was small things. Ezra complained about his father's campaign eating every dinner conversation, about reporters camped outside the gate before the fundraiser, about his mother's careful, worried eyes whenever she asked how school was. Small, safe things.

Other nights it went further than he meant it to.

**Ezra: Can I tell you something stupid?**

**Unknown: Always.**

**Ezra: I used to think if I lost enough weight, or got good enough grades, or did literally anything different, people would stop. Like it was something I could fix if I just tried hard enough.**

**Unknown: It was never about you needing to fix anything.**

**Ezra: I know that now. Knowing it doesn't really help.**

**Unknown: No. It usually doesn't.**

There was something almost unbearable about being understood like that, without having to perform it, without having to make a joke out of his own pain so it would be easier for someone else to hear. Ezra found himself typing things at eleven at night that he'd never said in daylight to a single living person. Not Sophie. Not his mother.

**Ezra: I've liked him for three years.**

He hit send before he could stop himself.

The three dots appeared almost instantly, like the stranger had been waiting.

**Unknown: I know.**

**Ezra: You know?**

**Unknown: It's not exactly subtle. The way you go quiet whenever he's around. The way you watch him when you think nobody's looking.**

Ezra's face burned in the dark of his room.

**Ezra: Great. So everyone can see it except him.**

**Unknown: Would you want him to see it?**

Ezra didn't answer right away. He thought about the cafeteria, the lockers, three years of jokes about his weight and his name and his father, all of it delivered by the same boy Ezra couldn't stop loving no matter how much smarter he knew better than to be.

**Ezra: I already tried that. It didn't go well.**

**Unknown: What happened?**

He almost didn't type it. His thumb hovered over the screen so long the message box blinked empty and waiting. But it was dark, and it was late, and the person on the other end had never once laughed at him.

**Ezra: Last semester I wrote him a letter. Didn't sign it. Just... told him how I felt. Slipped it into his locker before homeroom.**

**Unknown: What did he do?**

**Ezra: Read it out loud to his friends at lunch. Thought it was hilarious. Made jokes for a week about some "secret admirer" being too much of a coward to sign their name.**

**Unknown: He didn't know it was you.**

**Ezra: No. And he never will.**

The reply took a while this time. Long enough that Ezra almost put the phone down and told himself he'd said too much already.

Then:

**Unknown: Are you sure?**

Ezra frowned at the screen.

**Ezra: What do you mean?**

**Unknown: I just mean .... secrets like that don't always stay secrets. Especially not at a school like yours.**

A small, cold feeling moved through his chest, though he couldn't quite say why.

**Ezra: Nobody knows but you. And I'm not even sure who you are.**

**Unknown: Does it matter? I've never once made you feel stupid for any of this.**

That part was true. Whoever they were, they'd never once laughed.

**Ezra: No. I guess it doesn't.**

**Unknown: Get some sleep, Ezra. You have school tomorrow.**

**Ezra: Wait.**

**Unknown: Yeah?**

Ezra stared at the cursor blinking in the empty message box, a dozen questions crowding behind his teeth .... *who are you, how do you know so much, why do you care* .... and in the end typed none of them.

**Ezra: Thanks. For listening.**

**Unknown: Always.**

He set the phone on his nightstand and lay in the dark a long time, replaying the letter, the locker, Jace's laugh carrying across the cafeteria like it was the funniest thing he'd heard all year. He'd buried that memory so deep he almost never let himself touch it.

Tonight it sat right at the surface, refusing to settle.

*Are you sure?*

The question circled his mind long after he should have been asleep. Somewhere in the back of it, absurdly, he thought of Sophie's warning about Gary.

He almost hoped that's all this was.

A stranger. Nothing more. Nobody who actually knew Jace, or the letter, or any of it.

He told himself that a lot, lately.

He was getting worse at believing it.