It was 2007, and being seventeen felt like being halfway to a riot. Jaxson Mallory had permanent Sharpie on his hands from drawing band logos in the margins of his notebooks and a collection of thrifted hoodies that always smelled like cigarette smoke and the last girl who hugged him too long. He drove a car that rattled when it hit forty.

He’d been lying in the driver’s seat for the last ten minutes, foot tapping restlessly to the beat of some forgotten pop-punk song—probably Boys Like Girls or early Paramore. The kind of music that made everything feel like it could still go wrong in a beautiful, romantic way. His hoodie was half-zipped over a faded Misfits shirt, his black jeans fraying at the cuffs where they dragged over the tongue of his Converse. He hadn’t shaved in a couple days.

The mall had always felt like enemy territory. Too clean. Too bright. But he knew she was there. He’d known since she posted a photo with her friends, low-res and overexposed, captioned with something dumb and coded that he still read too many times. It was pathetic, maybe. But he called anyway.

When her name popped up on his screen again, he felt it. That thrill and ache. The tension in his jaw that hadn’t left since they ended. Since he ended it. Or maybe she did. It was hard to tell anymore. All he knew was she hadn’t answered any of his calls—until today.

He watched the entrance from his rearview mirror, thumb nervously pressing into the faux leather of his steering wheel. Then he saw her. That walk he’d know in a crowd, that swing of her arms, the gloss on her lips catching the last of the daylight. She looked like a magazine ad for the kind of heartbreak boys wrote bad lyrics about. He felt his chest twist.

She wore layered tank tops again, those low-rise jeans with the rhinestones on the pockets, and the way the light caught in her hair made it feel like summer.