Katie takes her seat at our usual lunch table. Her dark eyes have a haunted expression behind them. She opens her lips and pauses like she doesn’t know what to say. But before the words come out, her attention shifts. She quickly nudges her iPad to cover her sketchbook, where I swear I glimpse a drawing of me—an isolated girl, surrounded by people whispering. I avert my eyes, thankful the speech bubbles are too small to read, and pretend not to see it. It’s not like she’s mocking me. It’s just her observation of what the day’s been like. And she isn’t wrong.

Katie paws her dark, silky hair and collects herself. “When I told you I was going to Navy Pier and you told me not to go, I thought you were . . .”

“Crazy?” I act like it doesn’t hurt. When she texted me her plans Saturday morning and I wrote a million times back, begging her not to go, I could tell, even then, she thought I was irrational—her responses made that clear.

Katie drops her eyes. “You weren’t making sense. You didn’t say why.”

Not that it would have mattered. She wasn’t the only one who didn’t believe me. It just stung a little more coming from her. “I’m glad you weren’t there,” I say. Maybe I should sound more reassuring, but I don’t have it in me. The entire student body has treated me like some social leper with bad-luck disease, watching me from a distance, whispering behind my back. All of them. Like they passed around a morning memo titled How to Handle Lia Finch and they refuse to waver from what everyone else is doing.

I’d still take this over home lockdown.

Katie grabs a black, hexagon-shaped pencil from her backpack decorated with buttons: Save the Parks, Hate Free Zone, Keep Calm and Be Creative. She shades the anime avatar on the cover of her assignment notebook—the one of a girl holding a picket sign, who bears a striking resemblance to her. Katie glances at me. “I was supposed to collect signatures for Save the Parks.”

I think of Pixie Girl. Where was she when the attack broke out? Did her short, skinny legs run fast enough, sparing her from everything I witnessed?

Adam walks up, completing our trio. “You look so much worse than everyone’s been saying.”

If there wasn’t so much awkward tension between Katie and me already, I’d consider smiling. Adam mocking me for looking too boring or pale or tired feels normal. And right now, more than ever, I need normalcy.

“You should have seen me this weekend,” I say.

“Oh, we did. The whole world saw you wretched and waterlogged with seaweed in your hair. Thank God someone had enough sense to give you that coat we all know wasn’t yours.”