“Are you okay?” Berry asked quietly.

“I have to go find Tanner,” I said, slinging my skates over my shoulder and charging into the school. “And no.”

“Oh,” Berry said.

Tanner was standing in the hall right next to the door to homeroom, wearing his signature soccer jersey and jeans. Soccer ball in hand. Waiting. He looked up and spotted me, his thick lips curling into a smile. Sarah stood on his left and Gilly leaned against the wall on his right, a book clutched to her chest.

“Well, well,” Sarah singsonged as I approached them. “It’s Pizza Girl.”

Popping the p like it was bubble gum.

I pulled my whole body into a fist. Held it tightly. I stopped in front of Tanner. Took a breath. “Tanner. I want to apologize for hitting you with a piece of pizza yesterday.”

Tanner’s mouth gaped open. “Uh-huh.”

“It wasn’t appropriate. So I’m sorry.”

Tanner nodded, his tongue poked into the back of his bottom lip. “Yeah and.”

The fist tightened. What was he getting at? I’d apologized. What did he want?

More.

“I won’t do it again,” I said, my voice small.

Me. Small.

“Yah.” Tanner smirked at Sarah, who smirked back. Gilly looked down the hall. Slow, like he was savoring each moment, Tanner draped his arm over Sarah’s shoulder. “See you don’t. Can’t have that kind of behavior around here.”

Crying is natural and healthy. Both my moms “have cries” and sometimes Millie even makes us watch sad movies so we will cry, if she feels we all need it. Lucy says it’s a natural human filtration system. But in the halls of Greenville, it felt dangerous, opening up my insides like a set of shutters so everyone could see inside my house.

So I uncried, which requires kind of disappearing from your body for a moment and going somewhere far away. I used to do it when I was really small, when I got scared. I’d float away. I called it “ballooning.”

I just sort of drifted off. And me in jeans and a white shirt floated into homeroom and then floated to Math. Then I floated to Biology, a dotted outline of a person. And that was pretty much me for the rest of the day.

I honestly hadn’t even noticed that the day was over until Berry poked me lightly in the shoulder as I was standing in front of my locker and asked if I wanted to skate around the parking lot after school.

“It might, you know”—she searched my face with her hazel eyes—“help to sort of shake the day off.”

The more she looked at me, the less I was an outline. It was like she was coloring me in with her eyes.

“I don’t know,” I said.

I noticed Berry had a freckle on her nose that looked like a heart.