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  Lola chomped on pungent strawberry gum, giving the air around us the smell of plug-in air freshener. She had a way of talking that didn’t leave room for the other person to say anything, which seemed to work out best for both of us.

  Inside, we were quickly accosted by Min Mathers, senior class secretary, and Cindy Kahlen, varsity cheerleader. Both had a bad habit of unnecessarily elongating their words. “Ohhh my goddd,” said Min when she saw me. “How saaad is your mom. Pooor thiiing.”

  “I knooow,” added Cindy. She wore a yellow ribbon around her wrist like a bracelet. Min had one in her hair, fashioned as a pony-tail holder. “Are you okaaay?” she asked.

  They both stared at me as if I were a specimen. I stared back. Min had a birthmark that was so well placed (due northeast of the corner of her lip) and so perfectly round it could have been applied meticulously with eyebrow pencil daily. Cindy tipped her head in just the right way to make her layered hair fall dramatically against her cheek. Lola Pepper stood quietly beside me; she, I had quickly discovered, was constantly attuned to rank, easily cowed by anyone from the higher rungs. Min Mathers and Cindy Kahlen, whose faces dotted the yearbook candids, who had the power to single-handedly bring back strange styles like leg warmers or blue eye shadow, who leaned in close to apply grease pencil to the faces of Franklin athletes before their games, easily qualified.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Hi, you guys,” Lola Pepper said, and I almost felt bad for her when neither even looked her way.

  “You’d look really good with a bob,” Cindy said, touching the ends of my hair. I hadn’t even showered that morning. My hair sat greasily in Cindy’s manicured fingers. Despite myself, I felt ashamed. Cindy didn’t act like she even noticed.

  “Yeah,” said Min. “A bahhhb.”

  They both smiled at me, nodding. One of them smelled like peppermint.

  “A bob,” I repeated pointlessly. And I thought, not for the first time, how easy it would be to be seduced by them. Standing right next to them, smelling them, I could see the pull of pretty, the mesmeric power of the shiny teeth and huge smiles and evenly powdered skin and evenly separated eyelashes. Even if you knew better, you could start to think what they said was true. You could start to hope it was true.

  They told me a few more times how cute I’d look. Cindy told me the name of her stylist; that’s what she called her haircutter. Lola Pepper chewed softly, dejectedly, on her gum. Min said, “Look what I found last night in my old French book” and handed me a folded-up piece of paper. “It’s from Danny. I think he wrote it like sometime last year. Weird, huh?”

  It didn’t seem weird at all. That was how I imagined Danny spent his time in French class, passing notes to girls like Min Mathers. It was his chopstick-sloppy writing on the front of the note. Min, it said, underlined a bunch of times. All three of them stared at me, ostensibly waiting for something dramatic, for me to unfold it right there and read it tearfully. Or maybe jam it tearfully into my back pocket and say, I can’t handle this right now. Or maybe tearfully thank Min.

  I thought of the beagles, how in the first days after we rescued them they were sick with gratitude, following us around the house, lapping at our faces until we pushed them away (otherwise they’d keep going and going until they left a scratchy-tongued welt), answering to any name you gave them. “Horace!” Danny and I would yell. “Beauregard!” “Tootsie Roll!” Anything, just to see if they’d come. And they would.

  Lola, Min, and Cindy stared. I knew I was supposed to be their rescue beagle. We stood there wordlessly for so long it started to get strange. The note sat like a wafer in my palm. For a second I had an irrational fear that it would blow away. I shoved it in my pocket, shook Lola Pepper’s hand from my arm, mumbled “See ya,” and left. When they called my name, I pretended not to hear.

  I passed the shrine on the way to Mr. Dooler’s social studies class between second and third period. I always passed the shrine between second and third period. The only way to avoid it was to take the long loop around the science halls, which would make me late, giving Dooler occasion to peer over the rim of his glasses and scratch some angry notation into his attendance book. The shrine had formed spontaneously, starting with the Missing poster during the first week of school and growing steadily ever since, spanning a larger and larger patch of cinder block between the gym and the library. There were his yearbook shots from all three years, sports photos from the school paper, the article from the Free Press about the best swimmers in the state, a bunch of handwritten notes: Love ya, man; Come back soon, come back strong; Go, Apaches! Each time I walked past, I tried not to look closely, but the side of my face would grow warm, and I would feel almost bad for the people coming down the hall in the opposite direction, the ones who saw the shrine and then saw me and hardly knew what to do with their faces. Look at me? Look away? Smile? Frown? Scowl with concern? Cough into their hand? Pretend none of this was happening? Not that it really mattered; after one, two, three steps, they were safely past me and back to the sure footing of their lives, left only with the slight thrill of being, for one awkward moment, part of some dark and awful thing.

  For lunch, David Nelson and I sat outside on the concrete dividers in the student parking lot. Only juniors and seniors were allowed off-campus for lunch. Technically, sophomores weren’t even supposed to wander this far, but the parking lot was the best alternative to the jangling noise and sweaty competition of the cafeteria, and David Nelson had long ago discovered that if you were smart and quiet and not a troublemaker, the hall monitors would cut you some slack. It was chilly out and we ate with our coats on. I watched the white air come out of David Nelson’s mouth as he talked about Uganda.

  “I’m not sure of the good of a new constitution,” he said, “if there are still limits on political parties. Are we creating a more democratic system or dressing up a dictatorship?”

  “Is the new constitution going to lead to reforms?” I said. “I read somewhere that most Ugandans die before they’re fifty.”

  “Museveni’s no monster,” he said. The tips of his ears and nose were red from the cold. “He’s probably doing more good than bad. You can’t even compare the economic development of other countries in the region to Uganda’s. He blows them out of the water. But what’s going to stop him from being in power forever?”

  “Don’t make him out like he’s perfect,” I said. “He’s not managing that little civil war so well.”

  We loved these conversations, both of us just as busy admiring ourselves as participating. This was the closest we came to team sport.

  “Sure, sure,” David Nelson said, pausing to eat his turkey sandwich. He took such a big bite, mustard stained both corners of his mouth. I told him to wipe his face. He asked me to name a rebel army nastier than the LRA. I couldn’t think of one. My butt was freezing against the concrete.

  “Calling oneself the Lord’s Resistance Army does not bode well,” he said. “That’s not the name of the good guys, I’ll tell you that much.”

  “I don’t think the Lord is all that into kidnapping and enslaving children,” I said.

  David laughed. He laughed easily, especially when we were get-ting worked up. I’d known David since seventh grade, when we were taken out of our regular classes three afternoons a week and put in the talented-and-gifted room, where we solved basic trig problems with colored beads and wrote government charters for invented utopias. My utopia had been called Plutune, a combination of the two planets farthest from Earth, and David Nelson’s was Adnar-randa, because he’d been obsessed with palindromes.

  One of the hall monitors stalked past us in the lot. It was the old apple-faced lady who every so often showed up with her hair out of its bun, a thick white mane falling surprisingly down her back.

  David Nelson called out, “Cold afternoon, Mrs. Sholack.”

  “Sure is,” she said, making a dramatic display of cupping her collar around her neck. David Nelson thought it was politically
expedient to know all of the hall monitors by name. I tended to agree.

  “Way to shmooze, Museveni,” I said once the hall monitor was out of earshot.

  “That’s President Museveni to you, plebe.” David Nelson elbowed me gently in the side. Then: “You did good on the news last night,” as if that was what we’d just been talking about.

  I didn’t want to talk about it. David Nelson was the only person I didn’t have to talk about it with. When I sat there quietly, he knew to change the subject, asking me what I was doing after school. I told him I had Chuck.

  “Upchuck,” David Nelson said, which was the same stupid joke he made every time I mentioned my therapist, but it made me giggle anyway. For a while we leaned against each other for warmth, our jackets making slithery, rustling noises.

  My mom always used to mistake David Nelson for my boyfriend. When I’d refuse to go to school dances, she’d say “Didn’t David ask you?” and I’d explain that David was two inches shorter than me and weighed about seventy-four pounds. “But you love David,” she’d say, and I’d tell her, “You don’t get it,” and she’d ask me what there was to get. If we spent all our time together, wasn’t it fair for her to assume we were a couple? David and I, I tried to explain to her, were too up close and on top of each other for that kind of love. He’d once given me head lice. I’d seen the pox of his chicken pox. My mother and I ended those conversations like we ended most, with her thinking I was utterly incomprehensible and me feeling sorry for her small little understanding of the world. Danny, with his apelike attitude toward girls—he sought out only the hot, doting ones and then dated them for weeks before dumping them—seemed much more understandable to my parents.

  Upperclassmen started to come back from lunch, trickling through the parking lot in pairs or larger groups, carrying Taco Bell or McDonald’s bags and slurping pop loudly through straws. The spaces that had cleared out forty minutes ago started to fill again with shiny SUVs and tricked-out Japanese imports. The parking lot at the end of lunch was always a bit of a defeat, the aliens returning to claim the planet that had been briefly, barrenly ours.

  Tip Reynolds and a couple other football players spilled out of the cab of a pickup truck, their bodies bulky and almost unmanageable-looking. I suddenly busied myself with a crack in the pavement, hunching forward to examine it closely, but Tip saw me anyway and came stumbling over, followed by two of his loyal minions.

  “Lyd!” he called, putting his hand to his forehead in a strange salute. I could feel David Nelson tensing next to me. Before Danny went missing, it hadn’t been uncommon for David Nelson to be thrown against a locker or get his books slapped out of his hands, if not by Tip, by someone just like him. Being Danny Pasternak’s little sister’s best friend had held no cachet back then. More often than not, it made things worse. “Hey, faggot,” Danny used to say each time David Nelson appeared at our front door.

  But Tip and friends came today in peace. Tip stood right in front of me, hands on his hips, his crotch essentially in my face. How’s your mom, he wanted to know. What happened with that thing about Danny being seen in River Rouge? How’s your dad holding up? Fine, nothing, fine, I told him. One of the other football players, Gregory Baron, said, “I’m sure Danny just took off. Dude’s just chilling, smoking a doob somewhere, high and stupid as shit.”

  Tip told him to shut the fuck up. Gregory said he was just trying to stay positive. Tip said not to call Danny stupid. Gregory said he didn’t mean it like that, he just meant Danny’d be so high he’d forget to come home. Tip told him to shut the fuck up again, and then said, “It’s his sister,” emphasizing sister like it meant “holy one.”

  “Sorry,” Tip said to me. “He’s an asshole.” He said this as if Greg ory Baron weren’t standing one foot from us.

  “It’s fine,” I said. David Nelson scowled skeptically at Tip, like he couldn’t believe apes had learned to speak.

  Tip had been one of the last guys to see Danny. The police questioned him for hours and hours over a number of days. Nothing; Tip had nothing for them. He and Kent Newman and Danny had met up at the Larkgrove playground at around four on a Tuesday, played a couple hours of basketball, and left for their separate homes well before dark. They’d walked together as far as the parking lot, where Tip had offered Danny a ride and Danny had turned him down. It was a nice night, Danny told Tip, and he could jog the two miles home in fifteen minutes. It was 6:30 then. Tip’s mom and two neighbors confirmed that Tip was home by 6:45. Witnesses from the second basketball court at Larkgrove confirmed Tip’s version—the three boys were there for a while, messing around on the court, playing some one-on-one, a couple games of horse. Tip passed a polygraph. So did Kent. No one ever really thought they’d had anything to do with anything.

  But being the last to see Danny had seemed to change Tip, who used to come over and snatch books from my hands and read them aloud in a girlish, mocking voice or hide my backpack behind our garbage cans, seeming primarily to exist as a magnifying glass for Danny’s sluggish stupidity. Nowadays he acted like he owed me something.

  “You want?” he said, waving a half-eaten carton of fries in front of David Nelson and me. They had the pallid shine of being cold already, the cardboard carton spotted with grease along the bottom.

  “No, thank you,” David Nelson said in a staccato, fuck you very much tone.

  “Sure,” I said, grabbing them. “Thanks.”

  Tip then pulled ketchup packets from his pocket and held them out to me, which seemed a little laughable. Tip kept ketchup packets in his pocket, probably warm and slightly gross from the friction of his jeans and his massive thighs. Still, I reached my arm out, as if it weren’t even my body that it was attached to. “Thanks,” I heard myself repeating. Tip had what Cindy and Min did, that inexplicable gravitational pull that made it hard to say no.

  “Later,” Tip said, holding up two fingers in a peace sign. Greg ory Baron mumbled an apology as they left. The fries tasted pretty good. David Nelson sat next to me quietly, telling me no one time, then again, when I offered him some.

  Chuck wanted to talk about my dreams. I told him I didn’t remember my dreams, which was a lie. I often found myself lying to Chuck, which was not a habit of mine in general. Back in August, I’d been excited when my parents, at the urging of the huddle of cops who’d been camped out at our house for weeks, told me about the arrangements they’d made for me to talk to a counselor. I imagined a pillowy room filled with deep couches and soft light where I would reveal my every everything and be rewarded with warm embraces or at least the same sort of suckers my pediatrician used to give out after shots. I imagined my new therapist saying things to me like “That was a great insight” or “I’ve been waiting anxiously through my other patients to get to my time with you.”

  But there were no pillows in Chuck’s office, no deep couches. He sat in a swiveling desk chair, sometimes spinning himself just slightly back and forth as if staving off boredom, and I sat in a wooden-armed, tightly upholstered chair that reminded me of a waiting room. There was only one window, and its venetian blinds were always down, open just slightly, so I could make out only thin stripes of pale sky. Chuck rarely smiled, talked in a low monotone, stared directly at my face, and habitually slid his thin, wire-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose. I wanted to like Chuck—or, more accurately, I wanted Chuck to like me—but it was slow going.

  Even with his early speeches about this being a safe space and no one else being privy to these conversations, not even my parents, and this whole process being free of judgment, I had the sense of being on the precipice of unwittingly implicating myself in some terrible thing. With his methodical questioning, his expressionless reactions, and his irregular and distracting habit of jotting something down on his pad while I spoke, I had free-floating guilt, as if all I had ever done wrong was soon to be revealed (yes, I cheated off Lisa Barney’s social studies exam when I fell asleep the night before without getting to the Geneva Proto
col; yes, I was the one who made both of Oliver’s paws bleed after trimming his toenails too closely). A single poster hung in the office, behind Chuck’s desk. It was a reproduction of a Hockney-like painting, a front door of a house opening onto a sudden, serene ocean instead of a front lawn. I’m sure it was meant to be soothing—an ocean of opportunities awaits you just outside your front door—but it struck me more as a warning: take one wrong step and you’re sunk.

  “I don’t sleep enough to dream,” I said. I could remember part of one from the night before where I was getting married in a glittery purple dress and I had to clutch the dress to my chest because it was strapless and the elastic was old, so the whole thing felt like it was going to slip off.

  “Dreams can be just minutes long. Do you remember even part of one?”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Chuck sat quietly looking at me. He was particularly skilled at this. Sometimes I looked away. Sometimes I catalogued his face: the brown soul patch, the unusually full lips that made him look slightly feminine and pouty. Sometimes I thought things like Does he have a girlfriend? or How often does he have sex?

  “Okay,” he finally said. “How’s school?”

  “Fine.”

  “Are you still getting a lot of new attention?”

  The question embarrassed me, making me wish I’d never revealed the fact to begin with, as I had grown quickly to act as if it were unremarkable. I shrugged and briefly considered telling him about Tip at lunch, but I wasn’t sure what I’d say about it.

  “We can just sit here,” Chuck said. He said that a lot. “I’m not here to do the work for you.”

  “What work?”

  “What work do you think we have to do?” He nudged his glasses up his nose.

  It was disconcerting, really, the way he had of looking at my face. It made me want to blow my nose or check for sleep in the corners of my eyes.