I find Delaney standing alone in the water, wading in as far as her shorts let her with a few inches of leeway for the rising waves. I call out over the wind, a couple yards behind her on the shore. "You're gonna get sick."

"I killed Cath's fish," she confesses, blankly watching the storm on the horizon.

My eyebrows go up, but I'm not surprised. "Yeah?"

She looks at me, just runs me clean through with these pallid, pinprick blue eyes, and it's everything that needs to be said at once.

"Okay," I say, because I don't know how to talk with my eyes like she does. "Is this meant to be, like, contrition? Standing in the ocean?"

"No." She goes back to ignoring me, and all I can do from here is stare at the tag on her tank-top. It seems like it’s bothering her, chafing at a spot on her back. "I'm looking for another fish."

"Huh." I'm no expert, but the only thing she's going to catch out there is a cold. I get distracted by my footprints in the wet sand before she speaks again.

"Can you help me?"

"Actually, Cath's mom just wanted you to come back inside. No one wants to finish the movie anymore and we won't cut the cake without you."

"Shut up."

My mouth twists. Yeah, fine, I expected that. "Can you at least get out of the water?"

"Shut up and help me."

It looks chilly, I've never caught a fish, and I quite like my legs at the temperature they are now, so naturally I find myself leaving my sandals on a nearby rock and trudging into the waves alongside her. There are little fish in the water here, but they're almost invisible against the sand. Nothing like the brilliant reddish-purple of Cath's betta fish, a living plume of ink in a 5-gallon tank. They dart away before either of us can even get close, keeping a wide berth. I pretend to try anyway, which is more than I can say for her. All she does is stand stock still, alternating between watching the water and the storm.

"How did you kill it?" I ask, mindlessly. It's the strangest pass at small talk I've made since I attended a funeral two years prior.

"I reached in and I pressed it against the tank wall. It wriggled for a while, and then it didn't." She sounds like she’s going down a shopping list, but her hands clench and unclench as she remembers it. My head starts hurting.

"Delaney, what's wrong with you?" It comes out more tired than appalled. There's no heat to it, I just need to know. I have to.

She doesn't say anything, but for the first time ever she breaks eye contact before I do. She lunges into the water on her knees, arms outstretched in a frightening display of speed.

I shield my face from the huge splash she kicks up, stumbling back a little. "Jesus!"

"I caught one,” she declares, soaked up to her stomach.

"What?"

She carefully gets up off of her knees, cupping something in her hands. I can't believe it. There's no way in hell.

"No way,” I breathe. Her eyes are wide, wider than I've ever seen them before. She shifts her thumbs to peer in.

"It's moving."

"Jesus Christ, Delaney." That was superhuman. She was superhuman. She's perfect.

Wordlessly, she crushes her hand into a tight fist. I open my mouth to say something, to ask her what she's doing. Nothing comes out. I can't even scream at her to stop. I'm seized by the ugly, searing impulse to strike her. I glance around and stoop to grab a black rock out of the water big enough to skip (who am I, Cain?) but before I straighten, something plinks back into the sea. My head whips up. She's still standing there but now her hand is open, her palm empty.

"Is it dead?" I ask her a question I already know the answer to. I saw her fist. I saw her knuckles turn white. Am I testing her? Is that what I want to do?

"I dropped it. It swam off." She doesn’t look up from her hand. I feel tiny and plain and stupider than ever.

I take inventory. I don't want to think she's lying to me. I don't need her lying to me, not when Cath already suspects Delaney killed her betta fish and Ava is terrified of both of them and Lara thinks she got a cold from swimming for two hours straight and Kelly just wants to know when the pizza is going to get here. I can't care about this right now. Pairs of ghostly, half-visible fish dart around our legs. I try to spot one belly-up in the waves, but it's hard to discern now that the sun is setting. It swam off. Her eyes go to the rock in my hand, then my face.

"What are you crying for?" she asks, and I can’t tell if she’s disgusted or genuinely confused. I don’t say anything, but I drop the rock. I wipe at my face and turn back to the shore, feeling inexplicably like I’ve lost something.

I put my sandals back on in silence and she follows, the two of us plodding up the driveway, half-sand, half-asphalt. The air grafts itself onto the backs of our necks like a second skin, rain starting to tentatively fall just as we get to the front steps. I can hear people setting the table inside, the TV still running True Detective since Cath's college brother reclaimed the remote after news broke about the fish. I stop before I ring the doorbell.

"I'm going to leave at 8. Do you need a ride?"

"I'd like that." She sounds like she's smiling, and I can't bear to look.

-

I stare out into the street, bundled in my bulky snow jacket. She doesn't even have her coat hood up, sitting next to me at the bus stop with the same ramrod-straight posture she's had for the entire time I've known her. I wait for the plow truck to pass by before I speak, thinking that it might drown out what I'm about to say.

"I don't like who I'm turning into." I speak too late, words settling conspicuously in the silence the truck leaves in its wake. She watches me from the corner of her eye.

"Why?"

I shrug. "I'm just unlikeable. I don't wanna be stuck like this forever. I'm annoying." I say what I can as if I were talking about the weather. It's not easy being sincere. It's never easy. She seems to ponder this for a moment, looking back out into the street like I had.

"Yeah." It's the perfect response. She makes no false promises. She offers no refutation, no platitudes. I don't even need to pretend to feel better. It's perfect. I'm never going to find this anywhere else.

"Thanks. I needed that."

A short silence. I break it, like I tend to do when given things that shouldn't be broken.

"I'm moving away."

"Why?" she asks again, but I like to imagine that there's something different in her voice.

"I don't know, but I'm happy that I'm leaving. I hate it here." I can't tell if that’s true. I’m bored here, maybe. She turns to look at me, eyes narrowing through her shock.

"Why are you doing this to me? I thought we were friends."

"We were. You were honest, and I was me."

"Yeah, I can be honest. Honest is good."

I just nod reassuringly, because I don't want her to think I could ever be upset about her perfect answer. "Honest is good."

"I don't understand. Did you want me to lie to you or not?"

"I don't think I need honesty. I don't want to be friends.” I stop myself before I say ‘with you’, because I’d like to think I’m better than that. “I want someone who knows who I am."

"I know everything about you." Her eyes are wide and bright and wild and her nostrils flare before she can control herself, and it’s like watching something I’ve built my whole life come crumbling down right in front of me. It's cathartic.

I nod again and try to smile. "And we can never be friends."

"I hate you," she says, and in a weird way I think I've been waiting for her to say that ever since we met. She looks like she's about to cry. A part of me wants to soothe her despite everything. Every single demented thing.

"Thanks. I needed that too." I can’t think of anything else to say, and she’s busy experiencing what it’s like to be speechless for the first time, so I figure those are as good parting words as any. I get up and begin the arduous walk to my house even though the bus comes down the street past me two minutes later. It’s a little under two miles through the snow and sludge, and the sun is low in the sky. I can't feel my legs when I get home.

I’m gone by next week, moving from New York to New Jersey. As far as I know, she still exists at that bus stop, stuck in time like a prehistoric bug in amber, like a two-inch betta fish in ice. I could go back tomorrow and she’d still be waiting for the bus to arrive. She’d be waiting for me to sit back down. I knew it could never end any other way.