Kill Switch by Penelope Douglas

I put the pieces together. His dog at seven, the party at
eleven and how his father yelled at him and how his demeanor
had already started to go downhill. I had nothing to do with
any of that.
“I was so alone,” he explained from somewhere on the
other side of my room. “I couldn’t talk to people. I didn’t have
any friends. I was scared all the time.” His voice was thick
with memory, as if it all happened just yesterday. “I just
wanted to be invisible, and if I couldn’t be invisible, then I just
wanted it to end. I was going to run away, because…” His sad
voice trailed off. “Because the only other way to escape was to
end it all.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. That’s what was going
through his mind when I met him that first time? What eleven
year old wants to die?
“You were so little,” he mused. “When you came into the
maze and noticed me hiding and crawled inside and sat down
at my side, it was like…”
Like you had a pet again.
“Like I wasn’t alone anymore,” he finished. “So little. So
quiet. But it was everything. Feeling you next to me.”
GGod, what was he doing to me?
“You taught me how to survive that day,” he said. “You
taught me how to be strong and how to get to the next minute.
And the next and the next. I could never forget, and when you
came back in high school, and I had changed into this, because
I’d seen so much shit,” he went on, “and my desires had
morphed into something ugly and twisted, but I’d fucking
survived, nonetheless, and didn’t swallow the bad for anyone
anymore, because you had taught me how to get rid of the shit.
I finally craved one more thing I realized had been missing
when I laid eyes on you again.”
I didn’t understand. I was eight. What could I possibly
have taught him to keep him surviving? To keep him fighting?
And what was missing from his existence after he’d gotten
through all that?