“Mom, I’m not signaling to them.” I pressed myself closer to the door. “God.”

“This is very dangerous.” Mom’s knuckles were white on the wheel. “I’d pull over, but I’m afraid to slow down in case they—oh!”

Both Mom and I lurched forward as the lip of Jaime’s vehicle bumped us from behind. The wheel spun frantically under Mom’s hands, and it steered us right into the gummy, pockmarked field. By the time Mom stilled the wheel and slammed on the brakes, we were thirty or so feet off the road, our tires dunked halfway in the muck.

“Goddamn assholes!” Mom gasped. She brought a trembling hand to her chest before turning to look at me. “Are you okay?”

Before I could tell her no, I wasn’t okay, Mom smacked the center console with an open hand. “Assholes!”

There was talk that I should consider other options for high school. But the idea of starting over somewhere new, of having to find my ranking in a new pecking order, all of it made me want to lie down and take a long nap. Maligned as I was at Bradley, I found comfort in knowing where I stood, that I could just go to class and eat lunch with the Shark and go home to study, focus on chiseling my tunnel out of there. At one point Mom mentioned homeschooling, but she quickly retracted the offer because she said she was at the point in her life where her body was changing (“Mom,” I’d groaned), and, for some reason, I had the ability to press her buttons in a way nobody else could. Feeling’s mutual, I almost told her, but decided against it, on account of the button pushing and all.

The school balked when Mom told them I was coming back. “I’m surprised,” Headmaster Mah said, “that TifAni would even want to come back. I’m not sure it’s the right decision for her.” He paused. “I’m not sure it’s the right decision for us.”

There wasn’t enough evidence to charge me with any crime, but that didn’t stop the court of public opinion from trying me. There were the notes and the yearbook ramblings, my prints that turned up on the gun along with the killers’. Anita, who I’d trusted, had determined that I showed little emotion for my dead classmates, and that I seemed excited to return to school now that my “problem peers” had been extinguished.

The most damning claim came from Dean, who insisted Arthur handed me the gun and told me to kill him “just like we’d planned.” Of course Arthur never said that, but no one was going to doubt the popular, six-packed soccer star, paralyzed from the waist down, his promising future wrenched from him at the starting line of what would have been a charmed life. The media sniffed around, wailed for a few weeks about how terrible it was that not all parties responsible for this tragedy would be brought to justice. Plump housewives with gold-plated crosses hidden in their heavy cleavage came in from all the over the country to lay cheap drugstore flowers on Dean’s front lawn, then went home to write grammatically incorrect hate mail to me: “Your going to be judged for what you did in the next life.”

Dan took Headmaster Mah to task, said the school would have an even bigger lawsuit on their hands than the one they were currently battling if they didn’t allow me to return. Some parents were suing. Peyton’s led the charge. The sprinklers in the old part of the cafeteria had never activated. Had they worked, they could have prevented the fire from spreading to the Brenner Baulkin Room. The coroner determined that Peyton died from smoke inhalation, not the gunshot wound. With medical attention and plastic surgery, Peyton could have lived a relatively normal life. Instead, he was still conscious when the fire swept into the room, his raw face absorbing all that smoke like a hunk of bread in hot soup. I’ll never not hate myself for leaving him there.

Dean was shipped off to a boarding school in Switzerland, a few miles from a progressive hospital specializing in experimental treatments for spinal cord injuries. The goal was to get him to walk again, but that never happened. Dean found the upside though. He wrote a book, Learning to Fly, that became an international bestseller. One speaking engagement lead to another, and Dean found himself a famous and well-regarded motivational speaker. I go to his website sometimes. There is a picture on the homepage of Dean, leaning forward in his wheelchair, embracing a pale bald child in a hospital bed. The grossly staged empathy on Dean’s face reminds me what I might have been capable of doing if Arthur had actually handed me the gun.

Hilary didn’t return to Bradley either. Her parents moved her away to Illinois, where her father’s side was from. I wrote her a letter once, and it was returned to me, the envelope pristine and unopened.

To Anita’s point, it was kind of unbelievable that everyone who had made my life so miserable was gone when school resumed for the spring semester. The cafeteria wouldn’t be rebuilt for another year, and, in the meantime, we ate lunch at our desks. A lot of pizza was ordered in, and no one complained about that.

That first month after Bradley resumed, I dry-heaved every morning before school. But I needed to build up my loneliness tolerance, was all. The loneliness became like a friend, my constant companion. I could depend on it, and only it.

I worked hard like I promised myself I would at Liam’s memorial service. Junior year, we took a trip to New York City, to visit tourist hot spots I would later despise, like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. At one point I was climbing off the bus and I bumped into a woman in a crisp black blazer and pointy, witchy shoes. She had a bulky cell phone pressed against her ear and a black bag with gold Prada lettering hooked around her wrist. I was a long ways off from worshiping at the Céline, Chloé, or Goyard thrones, but I certainly recognized Prada.

“Sorry,” I said, and took a step away from her.

She nodded at me briskly but never stopped speaking into her phone, “The samples need to be there by Friday.” As her heels snapped away on the pavement, I thought, There is no way that woman can ever get hurt. She had more important things to worry about than whether or not she would have to eat lunch alone. The samples had to arrive by Friday. And as I thought about all the other things that must make up her busy, important life, the cocktail parties and the sessions with the personal trainer and the shopping for crisp, Egyptian cotton sheets, there it started, my concrete and skyscraper wanderlust. I saw how there was a protection in success, and success was defined by threatening the minion on the other end of a cell phone, expensive pumps terrorizing the city, people stepping out of your way simply because you looked like you had more important places to be than they did. Somewhere along the way, a man got tangled up in this definition too.

I just had to get to that, I decided, and no one could hurt me again.

CHAPTER 15

I used to hold down the doorbell to annoy Arthur. Over the ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong I would pick up his muttering path through the house. “Jesus Christ, Tif,” he’d huff, when he finally wrenched the door open.

Today I knocked. I don’t think I could stand to hear the loop of that bell ever again.

The camera was behind me, my bra bulge directly in the shot. Barely seven hundred calories a day, and still I had that little lump of skin protruding beneath the harness of my bra. How was it possible?

Mrs. Finnerman opened the door. Age and loneliness had converged on her, like allied countries during wartime. You get one side, I’ll get the other. There was gray in her hair that would never be tended to, extra skin pulling the corners of her mouth low. Mrs. Finnerman had always been short and formless (Arthur’s heft came from his father). It seemed especially cruel that a person who had to deal with what Mrs. Finnerman had to deal with was as naturally weak and defenseless as she was. Jell-O muscles, legally blind, prone to debilitating headaches and sinus infections.