This lie of omission - about who was really talking to her - was necessary in order for him to be honest about absolutely everything else he said in those chats. When he told her about how Gaetan's stepdad broke a bottle off in his flesh when we were little or Gaetan once puked all over the Millers' kitchen after eating too much because his parents wouldn't give him lunch money for a week, he talked about himself in the third person, and I didn't realize until after I died that he had to do this. He wanted to think of those things as having happened to someone else, that he was just a kid messaging his soul mate and had to worry only about the excited fluttering in his chest each time her words formed on the screen.
Cole Nagamatsu - We Were Restless Things
