That night, she doesn’t sleep because she doesn’t have to. She cleans her room. She takes a walk down the driveway under the midnight moon, notices the windows of light still coming from the Cat Lady’s house next door. She goes back inside and writes the seven-page paper demanded by that black-hearted hag, Mrs. Lewis. (Of course, it’s a seven-page hate-fueled screed written in bold strokes with permanent marker. Which is to say, it’s not much of a paper at all and ends up as a pile of crumpled-up boulders in her trashcan.)

Atlanta even cleans the shotgun. She doesn’t have gun oil, so she uses WD-40 on the metal, olive oil on the wood. She doesn’t have a barrel brush, but she does have a wire clothing hanger that she bends and breaks and corkscrews into a wad of paper towel.

She even pulls back the hammer and goes to clean it, but suddenly her heart feels like a jar of moths, and it’s like she’s standing on the edge of a building, teetering on the balls of her feet—the vertigo threatens to overwhelm her, to eat her the way a bullfrog eats a mayfly.

Atlanta hurriedly slides the shotgun back under her bed.

For the rest of the night she lies above it, staring at her ceiling with wide-open eyes, willing her heart to stop flipping and fluttering.

“Psst!”

Atlanta hears it but doesn’t think it’s about her. She’s got her locker open and is going through the motions—pulling books down off the shelf and letting them tumble into her bag, even though at class time she’ll just sit in the back and read her Stephen King novel du jour (today it’s The Stand), collecting that sweet B-plus—and she’s thinking, too, about how she didn’t sleep one wink last night and doesn’t feel tired. Sure, the Adderall’s blissful ignorance failed her eventually, but really, that was her fault. C’mon. Getting out the shotgun? You handle snakes, you get bit by snakes.

Then: “Psst! Tsst! Fsst!” Again, ignorance is bliss.

She slams her locker shut, takes a long slurp from a Diet Coke.

Motion catches her attention at the corner of her eye.

“Atlanta! Hey!”

It’s Shane Lafluco. Shane’s dressed for—well, she doesn’t know what, but it’s sure not for high school: polo shirt, khakis, wing tips, not a hair out of place (so much so it calls to mind the plastic hair-helmets you snap onto LEGO figures). He’s hiding behind the water fountain that nobody uses because the water tastes like weed killer. Shane tries to wave her over before ducking into the alcove behind him.

Yeah, no. She walks the other way.

But it isn’t long before she hears the clop-clop-clop of his feet behind her, his stubby legs pinwheeling to catch up. “Wait. Wait.”