Warm color crept up my neck, but thankfully my shirt collar hid it for the most part. “You can’t believe everything you hear on TV,” I admonished, but I couldn’t help but wonder. Suddenly I wished I watched more television, and it began to dawn on me that there might be a reason Lu had gotten our cable turned off. “Why do you keep asking questions if you already think you know the answers?”

“Because I keep hearing these really stupid things about what happened to you and I can’t believe they’re true—even down here.”

I gritted my teeth. “Which things?” I almost growled.

She lifted her nose in the air and sniffed like a small, greedy animal. “All of them.”

“What do you know, anyway? You weren’t there.” My voice was rising, but I couldn’t really stop it. I wanted to smack her, and it was only out of respect for my surroundings that I did not do so.

“I didn’t have to be there. Everyone heard about it. Everyone knows.” She folded her arms, challenging me as surely as if she’d offered me pistols at sunrise. I wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t even know if the allegations were false—and if they were true, whether or not I should be upset or ashamed. I stood there confused, wanting to either retreat in disdain or defend myself, but not knowing which course of action was appropriate.

From pure desperation, I opted to misdirect. “Shut up, I’m trying to listen. You’re going to get us in trouble. We’re not supposed to be talking.”

She went on anyway, her voice just low enough to keep our teacher’s head from turning. “I mean, it’s not like it matters. You don’t have to say anything. I know it’s true, and I’m going to go home and tell my dad and stepmom that I got to meet you. I’ll tell them it’s all true, just like they heard on the TV, and that I’m stuck having class with that witch. They’ll love that. Maybe they’ll love it so much they’ll take me out of this stupid redneck school.”

I closed my eyes, concentrating on the old man, who went on speaking in his dreary drone about things I would have found fascinating under different circumstances. He gestured at the ceiling and said something pithy and rehearsed about the glass, and then he pointed back out at the restaurant and revealed another historical nugget.

It all sailed past me.

My rage was positively palpable. I wasn’t too offended by the R word; heaven knows I threw it around plenty myself. Even so, I wanted to slug April more surely than I wanted to wake up the next morning. My fingers wrung themselves into a white-knuckled frenzy, but I clutched them at my sides, paralyzed by indecision.