The air tasted freer. Still, though, somewhere deep, somewhere beneath the layer of intoxication, beneath the layer of relief, beneath the layer of anger, beneath all those sedimentary levels of delinquency, was a place of quiet pain. A little puddle of realization that, despite the fact that I hadn’t done anything to Leah, I had, somehow, placed myself in a world where a girl like that had felt embarrassed enough and angry enough and crazy enough to accuse us of a thing like that. To put it simply, I wasn’t living right.
