The Dead Boy's Guide To Second Chances

7. colliding orbits

THIRTEEN MONTHS PRIOR TO THE DEATH OF OLIVER SALLOW

To seventeen-year-old Oliver, it was almost frightening how easily Finn slid into his routine.

It didn't make any sense, really. They were opposites in nearly every way: there was Oliver with his all-black wardrobe and Shakespeare plays, his eyeliner and penchant for all things arcane, and then there was Finn, with his bright red hair and dimpling grin, his football friends and the lovingly filled Bambi lunch box he brought to school every day.

For the two years that Oliver had lived in Blissby, they'd existed in different solar systems; now, it was as if their orbits had collided, leaving them to circle unerringly around each other.

It didn't make any sense, but Oliver didn't think it needed to. Like one didn't question the gravity between planets, one didn't need to understand the intricate workings of the friendship between a student librarian and a star football player to accept that it was.

All of this was to say that, as the days went on, Oliver found himself inexplicably fond of Finn O'Connell. The boy who shuffled through the library doors seemed to him like an entirely different creature from the one who brawled with his friends in front of the lockers and interrupted class cracking jokes.

(Or so Oliver had heard. He didn't have any classes with Finn, but he did have the gift of wearing a perpetually disinterested expression that goaded people into comfortably carrying all sorts of conversations in his earshot, confident that Oliver Sallow, of all people, wasn't possibly interested in their petty gossip. Fools. The library was his court and they were his jesters. He thrived on petty gossip.)

Class clown or not, there was something unexpectedly sweet about Finn. He was usually soft-spoken, sometimes sleepy, and almost always the secret highlight of Oliver's day. Part of it, he thought, was that Finn never pried. He didn't ask the typical questions like: How old were you when you got put into the system? (Six.) Do you remember anything before that? (I don't even remember what I did five days ago.) Do you not have real parents? (What the fuck are real parents.)

These questions irked Oliver mostly because of their pushiness and the assumption that they were somehow entitled to the Oliver Sallow Sob Story, not because any of it was too emotional to talk about. He truly did not remember anything about before aside from the key facts: his father was unknown and his mother had died. It was possible that someone had once told him how, but he'd either repressed the answer or otherwise misplaced it.

Before he had perfected the art of silently staring people down until they admitted defeat, he'd come up with all kinds of gruesome scenarios. Died in a plane crash. Abducted by aliens. Worked as a spy until her fake identity was discovered and she was fed to a swimming pool of piranhas. Oliver himself had never felt the need to believe in any of them. As far as he was concerned, he had sprung fully-formed from the English Channel; a scrawny, distrustful Venus minus the Botticelli curls.

The point was this: unlike ninety-nine percent of the school's population, Oliver didn't just tolerate Finn—he genuinely looked forward to seeing him slump into one of the seats with his tie askew and his hair mussed after football practice.

Suddenly, it was easy to accept that the library wasn't Oliver's alone anymore, regardless of how outraged past him would've been at the idea. Easy to put down his plays and novels whenever Finn came over to his desk. Easy to agree to grammar-checking Finn's essays in exchange for Maltesers, smiley faces drawn in red on the bottom of the page, Pleasure doing business with you.

And when Oliver asked Finn for his number one Thursday afternoon so he could send him one of his playlists, that was easy, too.

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