“We need to set out a plan for you to graduate. I understand why you haven’t been in school, but you can’t just stop coming and still expect to get your degree.” I hear the bell in the background, and then the jumbled noises of five hundred kids finding their way to class. I’m hit with a sudden longing for my normal life and for the old, clueless me. I want to throw books into my locker and eat frozen yogurt with Shola and be bored senseless by calculus. I want to gossip about prom and eat Friday tacos and float on an oversized flamingo raft in the pool without thinking about telephoto lenses. I want to go to Wood Valley Giving Day, even though I complain about it every single year because you have to wear a hard hat and use tools and the dusty construction site ruins your sneakers. I want to visit Cesar after school and hear all about how he’s been doing on his weekly spelling quizzes.

“I’ve reached out to your mom and dad to discuss these arrangements, but they haven’t returned my calls,” Mrs. Oh says.

“Yeah, they’re a little distracted.” The irony isn’t lost on me that my parents, who have micromanaged every moment of my life at Wood Valley, who have literally become the poster children for the term snowplow parenting, are now not legally allowed to talk to my school advisor, or at least my mother isn’t. “So how do I graduate? Obviously I can’t go back.”

“The year is winding down anyway. It’s already May. We can offer you independent study, assign final projects and special exams for you to do from home. Everyone understands there are extenuating circumstances.” Right. Again, this is not what I expected. I thought Mrs. Oh would have tried to convince me to return to school. Clearly, they don’t want me spreading my cheating cooties all over campus.

I wonder if the headmaster, Mr. Hochman, considered expulsion. I wonder if Mrs. Oh talked him out of it.

No backsies, I think.

I remember Mrs. Pollack’s class, and how she went on and on about the idea of culpability—the various ways we end up paying for our sins. I think of all the people across the country who would like to see my mom and me sent to a Siberian labor camp. And then I think about how my mother hasn’t left her room in the forty-eight hours since our disastrous family meeting. She’s been eating Xanax like candy and telling Dad over and over that she’s still confused about why what she did is considered a crime at all. Occasionally, I hear her mumble the word Zurich.

I get it, though. Why what she did—what we did?—was a crime.