Peter's a sophomore, the girl is a freshman. She's leaning against her locker, just visible over Ned's shoulder- and there's something in the way her hair moves, like spun gold, that makes him wonder if this is how it starts.

He feels abruptly and incredibly nauseated. His heart rate jumps, and his mind goes blank.

It bothers him for the rest of the day.

The worst thing is, not all of the memories are bad .

There's the points that were bad. Really bad. There'd been moments of hiding under his bed with his knees up to his chest and waiting and dreading and hiding things. What everyone expects. Blanks, where he's repressed it.

But there's good moments. Before that.

There was a point- after the shyness wore off and before everything started- when they had fun together. Those points stand out more. Movies and homemade popcorn. Picking through the pages of his textbooks. Looking at all the big words and gloating to himself about being smart enough to understand the mystical knowledge of Q = mc∆T.

For once, he hadn't felt alone.

Peter wants to compartmentalise.

He wants to be able to see them as two separate people, almost. There was a before and an after, a boy who bought him snacks and taught him chemistry, and a different, harsher person who had hurt him.

There was a memory, incredibly vivid and incredibly pleasant ; in the aftermath of Ender's Game, when it was already past his bedtime. They'd walked to a near-deserted mall- Skip didn't drive yet- and been the only two people in Coldstone Creamery. Peter had spent the next-half hour slowly eating the best ice cream he'd ever had- just vanilla, just with sprinkles, but the atmosphere around it was amazing.

It had been t-minus two days.

Probably making sure Peter liked him too much to tattle.

They'd both been smart. That was the thing. They'd both been smart and liked the same books and had the same hobbies.

When Skip was frustrated, he'd bite his nails, tear off little yellowy slivers and spit them into a napkin. At finals week, his fingertips had been perpetually bloody.

In the present, Peter snips through his nail with one smooth motion. Swallows what he's removed. He doesn't want to think about it.

He does anyway.

The thing is- he has sympathy . Because he knew him. People were mean to Skip, too. His parents almost kicked him out. Peter knew the details. It felt like them against the world, sometimes. And that's impossible to reconcile with big, rough hands, with bruises in bad places and the horror of it all.

He makes excuses. Sometimes. He knows what the resources say, about cycles, about how that sort of thing carries on. It's baked right into the neurology, too- the brain looks different. And he knows from the newspaper that he's one link in a chain.

It's not really fair on either of them.

It's the one thing that he has no real defence against. It never bothers him until it does; and then, it sticks in his mind even as he's swinging through the sky. It is lead in his lungs and a lack of oxygen- a dizzying sort of revulsion, that makes him feel almost seasick.

It's not even what happened that worries him. It was bad, certainly, but it's over. Everything else is still unfolding. Things are still being churned up, like shotgun shells in an old battlefield.

It's a self-indulgent description. He never fought back.

Peter knows how social learning works. He knows the habits he picked up and how he got them. He knows where he got the nail-biting and the way he sometimes tugs his hair and it makes him feel repulsive. Contaminated. He's read all the quotes on it, seen all the blogs- someday he will have a body that boy never touched. But he won't have the mind to match.

And he doesn't know what else stuck.