I had no wallet with me, no money at all. If I did have money, I’d get a root beer, I thought, and then I thought, but if Sin-Jun hadn’t wanted to die, was it plausible to believe she’d wanted to end up here? The pills had to have been an impulsive decision, a matter of not this; anything except this moment.

So Sin-Jun, too-I had never suspected. Not, probably, that it would have changed the outcome of events if I had. After all, these were not topics you could discuss with someone else; what was there to say to another person about how it felt? You could concoct things you wanted but in certain moments the light shifted or time slowed-on Sundays in particular, time slowed, and occasionally on Saturday afternoons, if you didn’t have a game-and you saw that it was all really nothing. It was just endlessness and what you got or didn’t get would hardly make a difference, and then what was there? The loathsomely familiar room where you lived, your horrible face and body, and the rebuke of other people, how they were unbothered, how you would seem, if you tried to explain, kind of weird and kind of boring and not even original. Why did their lives proceed so easily? Why was it that you needed to convince them and they needed to be convinced and not the other way around? Not, of course, that you would actually succeed if you tried.

And then at dinner, we talked about what? Teachers or movies or spring vacation. It was just what you did; you socialized, you interacted. And the things you said, the walk from chapel to the schoolhouse, your backpack, tests, these were a bridge running above the rushing water of what you actually felt. The goal was: learn to ignore what’s down below. Fine if you met someone else who was the same as you, but you had to realize that nothing another person could do would make you feel better about any of it. In an odd way, suicide attempts seemed to me-I wouldn’t have thought this as a freshman, but I thought it now, two years later-naÏve. They didn’t achieve anything, the drama they set in motion couldn’t possibly be sustained. In the end, there was always your regular life, and no one could deal with it but you.

Someone approached the soda machine, and immediately I was waiting for him to leave. When he turned around, he said, “Hey there,” and I nodded without smiling.

“You okay?” he said. He was a young man, and he was carrying a little girl.

“I’m fine.”

“It looked like maybe something was upsetting you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I don’t mean to invade,” the man said quickly. Then he said, “You don’t recognize me, do you? Sorry, I should have-here you go.” He was wearing a long-sleeved flannel button-down over a white V-neck T-shirt, and from between the two shirts he extracted a lanyard on which hung a plastic badge. With the lanyard still around his neck, he held the badge out to me; in his other arm, he held both the little girl, who was observing us impassively, and his unopened can of Pepsi.

The man was six or seven feet away, and I had to stand and lean in to read the badge. Briefly, I considered not standing, but I stood anyway, more out of curiosity than politeness, and then I was glad I had. Ault School, the badge said across the top. The Ault crest was superimposed over the whole badge, and in one corner was a head shot of the guy in which he was grinning and sticking out his chin, as if he’d been joking with the photographer; below the photo, it said, David Bardo, Food Services.

“Sorry,” I said. “You look familiar, but I just didn’t-” I trailed off.

“Kitchen staff.”

“That’s right, of course.” And he actually did look familiar, in that vague way of someone you’ve never noticed before. I wondered just how cold I had been acting, and I was mortified. Because yes, I was someone who would be rude to a stranger, especially a male stranger who approached me in a public place; but I would never be rude to a member of the Ault staff. People unfamiliar with boarding schools probably imagined the opposite, that the students were haughty toward the janitors or the secretaries, but this was not the case at all-twice in the last five years, the senior class had dedicated the yearbook to Will Koomber, who was head of the grounds crew and had a kind of cult following. Will was a black man in his sixties, originally from Alabama, and rumored to be stoned most of the time, which contributed to his popularity. Guys particularly liked him-you’d see them outside during the day, standing just beyond the mulch while Will squatted and shoveled, and you’d hear them say things like “How’s your old lady, Will?” or, “You always gotta watch those Feds, huh?” The truth was that overhearing these exchanges made me nervous-the pleasantries seemed so precarious, it seemed so easy for a student to say something offensive and for Will to either react or not be able to react-but I also believed that Will and the Ault boys genuinely liked one another. I was the one overthinking the relationship, not them. Whenever I myself passed Will, especially if I was alone, he’d deliver some brief bit of third-person narration-“She’s in an awful big hurry,” or, “That’s a nice skirt she’s wearing today”-and I would duck my head and smile, wanting to express my gratitude to him for talking to me, too, and not just to the athletic guys and the pretty girls.

But the kitchen staff was a little different. Most students didn’t seem to know them, or at any rate, I didn’t. Whenever I was in the dining hall, I was consumed by thoughts of what food to select, of where to sit, and I didn’t pay attention to much beyond my own circumstances. As I stood in front of David Bardo trying to remember the other people who worked in the kitchen, I could come up mostly with rough demographic categories: the women in their twenties, the women in their fifties (in my mind, all the women in both groups had blue eyes and fair hair that they wore in nets or white caps, and all of them were overweight, with pale, chubby forearms). In a humid room adjacent to the kitchen, teenage boys did the dishwashing after dinner. They were often blasting heavy metal, and whenever I set my dirty dishes in the carousel at the front of the room, it surprised me that they were allowed to play that music, and at that volume. Most of these boys were skinny and had bad skin and crew cuts, and one was very fat, the skin on the tops of his cheeks pushing up to give him squinty eyes. The head chef-you knew because he wore one of those tall pouffy hats-looked to be in his forties, with a blond beard; sometimes he stood at the end of the cafeteria line, just past the steaming entrées behind the glass barrier, and made remarks whose content seemed like the hints of a helpful waiter at a nice restaurant but whose tone was always tinged with hostility: “You really should try the sole tonight,” or, “If you don’t take any eggplant timbale, you’re seriously missing out.” (Of course no one wanted sole or eggplant timbale-we wanted hot dogs and grilled cheese.)

And then, apparently, there was David Bardo. He was probably in his twenties, and he wasn’t tall-he might have been five nine-but he was big, barrel-chested, and broad-shouldered. He had dark cropped hair and a ruddy face with dark stubble. He looked like someone who might play ice hockey outside, on a frozen pond, or who would own a truck and know how to fix it if it broke down.

“Yeah, I recognized you right away,” he was saying. “I was like, I know her, she goes to the school. You’re, what, a sophomore?”

“A junior.”

“Okay, ’cause you’ve definitely been there the whole time I have, and I started in January of last year. Where’re you from?”

“Indiana.”

“That’s pretty far. But some of the kids are from California, right?”

“I guess so.”

“I wouldn’t mind checking out California. I’ve got a buddy living out in Santa Cruz now says he’s never coming back. You ever been there?”