“Yeah, because you’re out already,” Cross said. “Don’t be a bad sport.” (In such proximity to Cross, I stared at the floor, feeling clammy and unattractive from having been outside with Conchita.)

“No,” Aspeth said. “Try because it’s lame. And because there are enough basket cases at this school as it is.”

“Sure,” Cross said. “I completely believe you.”

They were standing about three feet from me, and then their bagels fell down the slide to the front of the toaster, and they were gone. So Cross was still in, I thought, and that was when I had the idea: If I stayed alive, eventually the game would lead me to him. Or it would lead him to me, which would be even better. For Cross to be in possession of a piece of paper with my name on it, for him to travel around campus in search of me, to reach out and place a sticker on my body-the possibility made me almost sad, almost terrified, with hope. For the first time since we’d ridden in the taxi together more than a month before, we’d be forced to talk; he’d have to acknowledge me.

Life is clearest when guided by ulterior motives; walking to chapel, I felt a sense of true purpose. I was on my way to kill McGrath Mills, a junior from Dallas whom I’d inherited from Allie Wray. I’d heard McGrath was good at lacrosse, and I thought that an athlete would probably be harder to kill-there was more of a chance he’d be into the game.

I’d decided the night before that my best bet was in the rush after morning chapel. Therefore, I’d left breakfast early, without Conchita, and I found a seat in chapel near the back. Usually I sat near the front, but I knew the back was the province of drowsy junior and senior boys and of students using chapel time to finish their homework. As the seats around me filled, I kept an eye out for McGrath. At seven fifty-eight, he took a seat two rows in front of me. While Mr. Coker, a chemistry teacher, gave a talk about how he’d developed patience by observing his grandfather during boyhood fishing trips to Wisconsin, I intently watched the back of McGrath’s head.

Though you were free to leave chapel after the hymn, I usually waited until the recessional was over. On this morning, however, before the last notes of “Jerusalem” rang out, I followed McGrath toward the exit. A bottleneck had formed at the doors-this was why normally I waited-and people were pushing each other and joking around. Parker Farrell, a senior, said, “Hey, Dooley, watch your back!” and then another guy shouted, “Quit grabbing my assassin!”

Two people stood between McGrath and me, and I wormed past one, then the other. With my right hand in my pocket, I’d transferred an orange sticker from the sheet to my finger. On the threshold of the chapel, McGrath was only a few inches from me; seeing the weave of his red polo shirt up close was like seeing the pores on another person’s face.

I withdrew my hand from my pocket and placed the sticker on his lower back, and I had not taken my hand away when Max Cobey, a junior standing to my left, said, “I saw that, whatever-your-name-is freshman girl, and you’re so busted. Hey, Mills, look at your back.”

McGrath turned toward Max, and Max pointed at me.

“She just tried to kill you,” Max said.

McGrath turned around. I was looking down, blushing furiously; without raising my chin, I glanced up, and I saw that McGrath was grinning. “You?” he said.

The swarm was moving forward, and the three of us found ourselves outside, in front of the chapel.

“You’re totally busted,” Max said again, quite loudly, and he pointed down at me; he was several inches taller than I was. But he didn’t seem hostile, as Devin had; rather, he was simply enthusiastic. A few other junior guys, friends of either Max’s or McGrath’s, gathered around us.

“What’s your name?” McGrath said. He had a Southern accent, a slight twang, and he’d stuck the orange sticker from his shirt onto the pad of his middle finger.

“My name’s Lee.”

“Did you try to kill me back there, Lee?”

I darted glances at the faces of the other boys, then looked back at McGrath. “Kind of,” I said, and they laughed.

“Here’s what I’m gonna tell you,” McGrath said. “It’s okay to try. But it would be wrong to succeed. You got that?”

“Tell her,” one of the other guys said.

“Let’s recap.” McGrath held up his right hand, the hand with the sticker. “Try, all right,” he said. He held up his left hand. “Succeed, wrong.” He shook his head. “Very, very wrong.”

“I’ll see if I can remember.”

“Ooh,” Max said. “She’s feisty.”

Already, I felt like I had crushes on both him and McGrath.

“All right now, Lee,” McGrath said as he turned away. “I’ll be watchin’ you.”

“Me, too,” one of the other boys said, and he mimed like he was holding binoculars in front of his eyes. Then he smiled at me, before catching up with his friends. (Simon Thomworth Allard, Hanover, New Hampshire–that afternoon in the dorm, I studied the school catalog until I’d figured out his identity.)

I was leaving the dining hall after dinner that night, wheeling Sin-Jun’s bike beside me for Conchita’s next lesson, when I glanced over my shoulder and saw Edmundo Saldana, a quiet-seeming sophomore I’d never talked to. Though several students had left the dining hall just before I had, Edmundo and I were alone; I was about ten feet in front of him.

“Are you trying to kill me?” I asked.

He scowled noncommittally.

My heartbeat picked up. “If you try to, I’ll yell,” I said. “And they’ll turn around.” I gestured ahead. I was half-bluffing-probably I wouldn’t yell because it would be melodramatic. But I also might, because of how much I wanted to stay in the game.

“It’s all kind of stupid,” Edmundo said. He mumbled his words, but I was listening intently. “I’m not that into it, you know?”

“So you are trying to kill me?” I couldn’t believe that I’d been right-as soon as I’d asked him, I’d realized he could easily have been headed to the library.

“I don’t really care,” Edmundo mumbled. “You want to live, I won’t kill you. I don’t know why they play this.” He was barely making eye contact with me, and I wondered if it was all a setup-he’d pretend not to care while inching closer, and then he’d pounce. But when I thought back to other times I’d noticed him around-Edmundo was from Phoenix, he was (I was nearly sure) on scholarship, and he and his roommate, a rich zitty white kid from Boston named Philip Ivers, supposedly did nothing but play backgammon in their room-it seemed like maybe Edmundo was always this shy and evasive. Certainly, he was an even more uncomfortable person than I was.

“If you don’t care, then will you let me live?” I said. “Will you turn around? Or you just stay here, and I’ll keep walking.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Edmundo said. “You keep walking, fine.”

When I told Conchita what had just happened, she said, “Edmundo has you? Edmundo Saldana?”

“Yeah, why?”

She had climbed onto the bike and was pedaling while I held on-she had definitely made progress, even in just the first lesson. “No reason, really,” she said. “I’m in MSA with him.” MSA stood for Minority Student Alliance, and I knew practically nothing about the group, except that it met on Sunday nights.

“You don’t have a crush on him, do you?” I asked.

“On Edmundo? Are you for real?”

“You just got kind of excited when I mentioned him.”

“I don’t believe in crushes,” Conchita said. “What’s the point?”

The question was unanswerable. What was the point of being a person, what was the point of breathing air?

“Don’t tell me you have a crush on someone,” she said. She glanced at me, inadvertently turning her arms as she twisted her neck. The bike swerved to the left, and she quickly faced straight ahead again. “Who?” she said. “I won’t tell. I promise.”

“I’m not telling someone who thinks all crushes are pointless.” In fact, I had never talked about Cross with anyone. I had not even said his name aloud since surprise holiday. But I had thought of him so often that sometimes when I saw him, it was weird-real Cross, moving-around Cross, Cross talking to his friends. He was the person I always thought of?