“No. His brother found him in time, at least that’s what I heard. He was alive when they took him away in the ambulance.”

“So he’ll be okay, right?”

“I hope so. There could be brain damage and he could have broken his neck.”

“Broken his neck?”

“He tried to hang himself.”

Sara’s face went white and her knees began to buckle. Lucy quickly pulled out a kitchen chair for her to sit on and shoved her head between her knees. In a minute or two she sat up but her color hadn’t improved. “That’s sick. I can’t believe he’d do that.”

“I noticed he seemed pretty unhappy even before his mother died,” said Lucy, dragging another chair out from under the table and sitting next to Sara. “I’ve been hearing rumors that the JV football players are getting bullied and hazed a lot. I wouldn’t be surprised if his mother’s death was the straw that broke the camel’s back and he just couldn’t go on anymore.”

Sara was silent and Lucy knew she had to find a way to get her to open up.

“If there is hazing and you know about it, you have to speak up. What if some other kid decides to kill himself? How would you feel then?”

“C’mon, Mom. Tommy was screwed up, right?”

“So it’s his fault he tried to hang himself?”

“Well, nobody did it to him, did they?”

“I think we all bear some responsibility, everybody who knew him.”

“How could they know he’d do something like this?” she demanded, her face flushed with anger.

Aha, thought Lucy. She’d finally hit a nerve. “Who couldn’t have known?” she asked.

“The varsity guys.”

“All of them?”

“Pretty much,” admitted Sara. “It’s what guys do. No big deal.” Sara shrugged, and then, to Lucy’s amazement, began sobbing.

“Oh, honey,” she cooed, wrapping her arms around her but Sara shrugged out of her hug, wiping her eyes.

“I’m being stupid. I don’t know what came over me.”

“You have a right to your feelings,” said Lucy. “If you can’t trust yourself, who can you trust?”

Sara sighed and paused, as if weighing her options. Finally she spoke. “Some of the players got a little obnoxious today after practice, that’s all.”

“What do you mean?” asked Lucy. It was gradually dawning on her that Sara was upset about more than Tommy’s attempted suicide. “Did they do something to you?”

Sara looked at the ceiling. “They kind of cornered a few of us, me and Sassie and Renee, and well, Renee’s really busty and they wanted to know if her boobs were real so they made me squeeze them and say if they were.”

Lucy was appalled. “You did that?”

“Renee said it was okay.”

“And where was the coach during all this?”

Sara shrugged. “I don’t know.”