“I’m going to make you hurt,” he says.

He pats her cheek. She flinches—his touch disgusts her, dumps a cup of cockroaches into her stomach. Mitchell Erickson walks away then, joining the flow of kids in the hallway, merging with the stream, calling to some “bro” of his.

Atlanta goes into the girls’ bathroom and throws up her lunch.

It’s when she sees Shane at the end of the day that she knows how fucked it’s going to get. His nose is swollen. Not broken, but bleeding. His whole upper lip encrusted with a blood mustache.

Shane’s eyes are puffy, too. He won’t say why, but Atlanta knows.

She starts to tell him she’s sorry, Mitchell came up to her, threatened her, she had no idea—

“Mitchell? No,” he says, but the way he says it with his nose all busted it comes out Bitchell? Doh. “Wasn’t him. It was the other two. Jonesy and Virgil.”

Shit shit shit shit shit.

“Shit shit shit shit shit,” she says. She, Chris, and Shane are outside her house. Those two on the porch steps, she pacing in front of them like a nervous tiger. A tiger who’s burned out on no sleep and lots of Adderall and who just got threatened by much bigger tigers.

“It’ll be fine,” Chris says, upbeat, but nobody really believes it.

Shane’s nose looks like a bumpy turnip. Except scabbier. He says they surprised him around the side of the building, by the bus platform. Hit him across the bridge of the nose with a piece of smooth-sanded wood—like a chair leg or something from shop class. Then they ran off. A teacher found him, actually had the gall to yell at him. Like it was his fault he got bullied.

“That’s how they are,” Chris says when he hears that. “The adults don’t care. It goes back to that rape thing. They think if we get bullied it’s because we’re asking for it. Look at the way those nerds were dressed. You’re gay. You’re Mexican—”

“Venezuelan,” Shane corrects.

“You carry comic books. It’s like a bull’s-eye. They don’t ask, How do we stop bullies? Instead those assholes say, How can we get these stupid kids to stop painting bull’s-eyes on their foreheads? They put the blame on the victims, not the victimizers.”

“I’m sorry,” Atlanta finally blurts out. “Y’all, this is my fault.”

“Your fault?” Chris asks. “Oh, shit, excuse me.” He takes a sip from the beer that Atlanta stole from her mother—Coors Light again, i.e., runoff from dirty rain gutters—and then spits it out in a comical spray. “Your fault? Sorry, wanted to do a spit-take on that one.”

“I poked the bear. You don’t poke the bear. I’m sitting here thinking, what? That I could just swoop in like some kind of gol-dang vigilante—”