“She isn’t making sense.” Lily focused on Dean Cumberland. She didn’t know how much argument she had left in her. If the dean didn’t agree, Lily might just collapse onto the stage in tears herself. “She hasn’t been sleeping. She needs to get some rest. Sir, please.”

The dean seemed to still be in a daze.

“Yes, take her to the health center,” he finally muttered, waving Lily on.

“No!” The look in Mateo’s eyes was fierce.

The dean didn’t seem to hear Mateo. He grabbed the dean’s arm.

“Look, she’s obviously on something.” Mateo sounded just as desperate as Lily. “At least take her to the hospital and get her tested.”

“No!” Lily said. “She didn’t take anything. Sir, please!”

Lily wished she hadn’t climbed onto this stage at all. No one would’ve thought she had anything to do with Maria or Maria’s crazy. Now it was way too late.

“It’s not anything,” Lily went on when the dean looked unconvinced. “I swear. I’ve been with her all day and she didn’t take anything. I’ll just bring her to the health center and they’ll check her out.”

The dean looked at Lily as if he were seeing her for the first time. His eyes slid down to her crutches. Then he looked up at her face again and nodded.

Lily looped her arm around Maria’s shoulders. She didn’t bother looking to Mateo, or anyone else, for help this time.

Maria hadn’t said any single word since the lights came back on.

Lily twisted around and unwrapped Maria’s arm from her waist. Maria stumbled, catching her skinned knee on Lily’s dress. When she stepped back again, there was a smear of blood on Lily’s white linen skirt. Lily managed not to retch at the sight.

She drew back, trying to steer Maria down the steps on her crutches. The dean had to help her. The ballroom was tiny, already too small for the hundred students squeezed into it, but even so everyone fell back to make a path for Maria and Lily to get out of the room. As if they didn’t want Maria to touch them.

Lily couldn’t blame them.

The feeling of all those eyes on Maria, on both of them—the girls gazing at her and biting their lips, the guys smirking—it made Lily’s skin crawl. She wanted to sink down into the floor.

She knew, rationally, that the people in the crowd were thinking about Maria. About the spectacle she’d made up on the stage during what was supposed to be a moment of silence for her dead best friend. They were wondering whether Maria was on something or whether she’d just gone crazy. Emily, standing at the front of the crowd in her red one-shoulder gown, was watching Maria with one eyebrow quirked up, as if she found the whole thing mildly funny.