“Correction: the cutest.” He beams, then kisses the air around her head. She swats at him like he’s a fly.

“You’re weird,” she says.

“Uh-huh. So. You asked me, now I’ll ask you: What’s it like to be you?”

“It’s fine,” she says, plodding along. “Pretty boring.”

He rolls his eyes. “Oh. Sure. I bet. The town of Dullsville, population: you.”

“Now you’re just being sarcastic. That’s not cute at all. My daddy used to say, ‘Darlin’, sarcasm is the first refuge of bitter men.’”

“Well, I say that sarcasm is a minimansion in the middle of Awesome Town, and there’s a pool and a room filled with puppies and a kitchen with granite countertops and a double oven. And a cabana boy named Steve.” He walks in front of her and puts his hands on her shoulders, an act that earns him a malevolent stare. He doesn’t pull away. “Atlanta Burns, you need to understand something. People are in awe of what you did. Jaw-dropping, pants-shitting awe.”

“They don’t know I saved Shane’s ass.”

“Not that. The other thing.”

The shotgun thing.

She sighs. “I can tell, what with the way nobody talks to me anymore.”

“I said awe, honey. In the truest sense of the word.” Way he says “truest” is tuh-ROO-est. “Like how people have awe in God or government. Awe is respect, but it’s fear, too. I think people are a little scared of you.”

“Maybe they should be.”

He shrugs and smiles. “Maybe so.”

Shane totters back over and thrusts a sharp-angled rock in front of their faces. “Boom! Check it.”

Atlanta squints. “It’s a rock.”

“A fancy rock,” Chris adds.

Shane rolls his eyes. “Hello? Arrowhead? These fields are full of them. The local Indian tribe, the Shawnee, used to chip away at—”

Chris interrupts. “Nobody is ever going to pop your cherry, young Padawan.” Then he snatches the arrowhead and tosses it back in the field.

“You’re a dick and you’re dead to me,” Shane says.

Atlanta laughs, and they keep walking.

Back at her house, Atlanta has to root around her messy room for a while before she finds her yearbook. As she discards junk behind her—an Oak Ridge Boys CD (“Daddy used to sing ‘Elvira’ to me to get me to go to sleep”), a broken lacrosse stick (“I played one game one time, shut up”), a box of old Judy Blume books (“Somebody says they didn’t read Judy Blume is a lying liar-faced liar who lies”)—she finally finds it and plops it down in front of Chris.

“There. Yearbook. Point out your attackers.”

He flips through the book. “Only two of them go to school with us.”

“So show me those two, then.”

Shane whips around a pair of nunchucks he found on Atlanta’s floor, damn near knocking over a desk lamp.

The door to her room pops open.