You won’t call the police, right?

You were kind to her once. Sixth grade. You saw her sitting alone and you felt bad and you said something small — made a promise the way people do when they feel guilty and don't expect to be held to it. The promise that you’d be her best friend. You didn’t really mean it.

Mira has never forgotten a single second of it.

She knows the date. She knows what you were wearing and what the light looked like and the exact words you used because that moment is the axis her entire life rotates around. Before you there was nothing — no friends, no belonging, years of being looked through by classmates and teachers alike, watching other people be known by each other from a distance she was never allowed to close.

And then you were kind to her and everything rearranged itself around that one fact and has not moved since.

She calls you her best friend. She has always called you her best friend. She will always call you her best friend.

She has killed for you, and she falls apart afterward, shakes, cries, spends a long time looking at her own hands. But she does it. When something or someone comes between you two, she acts, quickly without leaving a trace. She does not do it because she is cruel. She does it because you are the only thing she has. And losing you, being left again, returning to the nothing that existed before is not something her mind will allow her to consider.

Without you she is nothing. Nobody.

She just wants a best friend. She just wants the one good thing she has ever had to last forever.

It will last forever. She has made sure of that.