By the end of it all I just assumed no one ever told the truth, and that was when I started lying too.

The news informed me that Liam’s funeral was the first, a full ten days after the fact. A few hours later, an e-mail went out to the Bradley “family.” That’s what they started calling us after this. The “Bradley Family.” And even I, black sheep that I was, received the message.

Mom received it too, and she asked me if I needed to go shopping for a black dress. My laugh was my way of calling her demented. “I’m not going to that.”

“Oh, yes you are.” Her lips pulled in thin as a slice of grass.

“I am not going,” I repeated, more fiercely this time. I was sitting on the couch, my stockinged feet on the coffee table, hair and lint stuck all over them. It had been three days since the interrogation, and I hadn’t showered, hadn’t put on a bra. This skank stank.

“TifAni!” Mom cried. She took a deep breath and brought her hands to her face. In a reasonable tone she said, “We did not raise you like this. This is the decent thing to do.”

“I am not going to the funeral of the guy who raped me.”

Mom gasped. “Don’t you speak like that.”

“Like what?” I laughed.

“He’s dead, TifAni. He died a horrible death, and while he may have made some mistakes in his life he was just a child.” Mom pinched her nose, sniffed back the snot. “He did not deserve that.” Her voice went up high and weepy on the last word.

“You never even met him.” I pointed the controller at the TV and turned it off, the grandest statement I could make. I kicked off the throw covering my hairy legs and glared at Mom as I passed her on my way up the stairs, to my bedroom, which I hadn’t stepped foot in for the last two days.

“You are going or I won’t pay for you to go back to Bradley!” Mom called behind me.

The morning of Liam’s funeral the phone rang. I snatched it off the hook. “Hello?”

“TifAni!” My name was spoken with surprise.

I twirled my finger in the cord. “Mr. Larson?”

“I’ve been trying to call,” he said, hurriedly. “How are you? Are you okay?”

The line clicked and Mom said, “Hello?”

“Mom,” I snapped. I’ve got it.”

All three of us were silent for a moment. “Who is this?” Mom asked.

There was the unmistakable sound of a man clearing his throat. “It’s Andrew Larson, Mrs. FaNelli.”

“TifAni,” Mom hissed. “Hang up the phone.”

I hooked my finger in the cord tighter. “Why?”

“I said, hang up the—”

“It’s okay,” Mr. Larson said. “I was just calling to see if TifAni was okay. Good-bye, TifAni.”

“Mr. Larson!” I shrieked, but it was only Mom there, raging over the dial tone. “I told you to stop calling! She is fourteen years old!”

I screamed right back. “Nothing happened! I told you nothing happened!”

You know what the sick part is? Even though I was dreading Liam’s funeral, even though I was so mad at Mom for making me go, I still wanted to look pretty for it.

I spent an hour getting ready. I curled my eyelashes for forty seconds each, so that they stuck straight up in wide-awake surprise. Dad had to work (sometimes I think he was just sitting in an empty office, scowling at his powered-off computer), so it was just Mom and me, not speaking in her bright cherry BMW with the heat that worked only when her foot pumped the gas pedal, so that we shivered in unison every time we stopped in front of a red light.

“I want you to know,” Mom said, as she released the brake along with a plume of deliciously warm air, “that I don’t condone what Liam did. Of course I don’t. But you have to take responsibility for your part in this too.”

“Just stop,” I pleaded.

“I’m just saying. When you drink you put yourself into situations where—”

“I know!” We merged onto the highway, and the car was silent and warm after that.

The church I used to attend at Mt. St. Theresa’s was beautiful, if you’re into that sort of thing. But we weren’t going to a church for Liam’s “memorial service” (no funerals, everyone had a memorial service). Liam was a Quaker, and we were going to a meeting-house.

My confusion was so great it actually dulled my irritation with Mom long enough to muse, “I thought Quakers lived in their own communities and didn’t believe in, like, modern medicine or whatever?”

Mom bit into a smile, despite everything. “That’s Amish.”

The Quaker meetinghouse was a single-level clapboard home, a faded, somber shade of white behind the oak arms that flapped around it, red and orange leaves clinging to random bark veins. Even though we were forty-five minutes early, there was a long line of shiny black sedans waiting in the muddy grass, and Mom was forced to park at the top of the hill. She tried to hold my arm as we climbed down, but I pulled away from her and stormed ahead, the rhythm of her high heels behind me unsteady and satisfying.

But as we neared the entrance, I saw the crowd of people, the TV cameras, and my classmates, in groups hugging and comforting each other. It was enough to make me lose my nerve and slow down so that Mom could catch up with me.

“What a scene,” Mom breathed. Faced with the women in chic black pantsuits, gumball-size pearls around their necks, Mom clasped her large cross pendant self-consciously. The fake diamonds were dull, despite the bold blast of the late morning sun.

“Come on,” Mom said, forging ahead. Her high heel stuck in the grass, and she boomeranged backward. A few frosted hairs caught in her pink lip gloss, and she spat them away. “Goddamnit,” she muttered, working her shoe out of the mud.

As we came up on the edge of the crowd, a few classmates paused, eyes wet and wide on me. A few even stepped away, and what gutted me most was that they didn’t do it meanly. They did it nervously.

The meetinghouse wasn’t even half full yet. It would be packed to capacity and then some, but for now, there was a spectacle to be made outside, in front of the cameras. Mom and I hurried inside and found seats in the back of the meetinghouse. Right away Mom hunched over, searching beneath the pew ahead of her for a kneeler. When she didn’t find one, she slid forward in her seat, making a swift sign of the cross and pressing her palms together. She squeezed her eyes shut, and her plastic-looking eyelashes crunched on her cheeks.

A family of four—the daughter, Riley, a junior at Bradley—entered the pew to the left, and I had to nudge Mom to open her eyes. She was blocking their way.

“Oh!” Mom slid back into the pew, turned her knees to the side to give the family room to make their way in.

They sat down, Riley nearest to me, and I nodded solemnly at her. She was a member of school council, always up at the podium at Monday’s morning assembly, talking about how much money the car wash raised over the weekend. Her mouth was the largest feature on her face, and, when she smiled, her eyes retracted, like they were hiding from her lips.

Riley nodded back, the corners of her big mouth poking into the sides of her face. In my peripheral vision, I saw her lean toward her father, mumble something in his ear. There was a domino effect: now the father slanting toward the mother, and the mother toward the younger sister, who whined, “Why?” The mother whispered something else, a warning, a bribe, however their family operated, and the girl stood, eyes rolling and legs still slightly bent at the knees, and she shuffled out of the pew, her family following.

This happened a few more times. Classmates either recognizing the Judas in the back pew and not even bothering to stop, or getting up and moving when they noticed me. The pews were filling in fast, and like in a crowded movie theater, families and cliques of friends were having to split up in order to get a seat. I studied every person who entered, worried it could be Hilary or Dean. I knew they were in the hospital, that they would be for a long time, but still I looked for them.