She hasn’t spoken to Shane since the night of the funeral. Shane tried to reach out. Phone calls and e-mails and chasing her down in the halls. But she always got away, and eventually he stopped trying. She told herself it was best: he deserved better friends. Friends that wouldn’t get him hurt. Or worse, killed.

People look at her now. Like, they actually look at her. Atlanta makes her way past lockers and the library and the administration office and out the front door toward the soccer field, and they watch her go by. Some even wave or say things to her. Eddie Peters tells her to have a good summer. Damita Martinez asks her to sign her yearbook. Kyle Clemons gives her a running high five without saying anything.

Takes her a little while to figure it out, but figure it out she does. Eddie is one of the La Cozy Nostra. Damita’s . . . well, Atlanta wants to say Mexican because that’s how all the white people around here see immigrants, but she’s probably Guatemalan. Or Venezuelan like Shane. Kyle is a gawky, zit-sprung spaz in a Doctor Who T-shirt and checkered Converse All-Stars. A nice spaz, but definitely, you know, spazzy.

These are her people now. The downtrodden and disaffected. The beaten and bullied, the used and abused. The jocks don’t talk to her. The pretty girls won’t say boo. The party kids and student-council jerks and the rich pricks still won’t give her a passing glance. But those beneath—the subterranean social dwellers, the mutants, the weirdos, the exiles—meet her eyes and, holy shit, actually talk to her.

But it isn’t long before she’s reminded how small this tribe of freaks really is.

She catches a whiff of weed, a skunky perfume plume that’s gone when the wind turns.

Words rise from the other side of the bleachers:

“Dude,” one of the voices, a boy’s, says. “God hates fags.”

Another voice: “. . . all should fuckin’ off themselves.”

“Obviously.”

“Obviously.”

Her bowels cinch like a too-tight belt. Sweat streaks the lines of her palms.

Keep walking, she thinks. Go home.

But even as she’s picturing herself walking home down the back roads and through the cornfields, her boots are already taking her the other way. Toward the bleachers. Toward the voices.

Two shapes stand there underneath the stands, passing a joint back and forth in a gray-green haze illuminated by vertical lines of afternoon sun. She knows the one: thick little nub that he is, catcher for the baseball team. Charlie Russo. The other—lankier, ropier—plays on the team, too, though she doesn’t know his name or position and doesn’t much care. Both are friends with Mitchell Erickson.

The two boys continue talking. “I’d kill myself if I were gay,” the lanky one says. “Especially that gay. Might as well be a fuckin’ girl, man.”