It all seemed to make sense, and had an internal logic. It’s just that its internal logic seemed to exclude me, and the world I thought I knew.

Katie caught me researching during lunch. I told her I was doing a report on road signs.

“Fun,” she said with “meh” kind of sarcasm. “What class?”

I was almost stumped by that, and rather than giving her a dumb I-really-haven’t-thought-this-out look, I said, “Math,” proving that I really hadn’t thought this out.

“Road signs for math?”

“I’m . . . uh . . . crunching traffic accident statistics, and how they relate to signage,” I said. Kudos to me for pulling something coherent out of my ass.

“Sounds more interesting than algebra,” she said.

And suddenly I had an overwhelming urge to confide in her. Maybe that was because she and I already shared a secret, albeit a stupid one.

Long story short, when I was in fifth grade, on the way to school, I ran over a squirrel on my bike. How the hell a squirrel could be slow enough to get caught under a bicycle tire is beyond me, but it did. I skidded to a halt and went back to it, not yet realizing that the roadkill writing was already on the wall. When I picked it up, it was still alive. It opened its mouth and closed it twice, like it was underwater, gasping for air. Then it shivered and died right there in my hands. You might be thinking “Big effing deal, critters die every day.” But when was the last time something died on you? And don’t talk to me about hunting, because that’s different; you know when you go out that it’s your intent to kill. But when something unexpectedly dies in your hands and it’s looking at you with those what-the-fuck-did-I-ever-do-to-you kind of eyes, it hits you in unpredictable ways. I suddenly burst into tears, talking to the thing like it could still hear me. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I whimpered. “I didn’t mean it!” Then I look up, and there’s Katie watching the whole thing.

I thought she’d say something mean, like “What kind of monster kills a squirrel?” Or maybe she’d laugh at me for my very uncool waterworks. But instead she said, “We should bury it.”

Not “you,” but “we.” With one word she turned a sad, solitary accident into a cover-up conspiracy.

We buried the squirrel in an unmarked grave in a nearby yard where we knew the owners didn’t have a dog that might dig it up. Neither of us spoke of it again, but ever since then, I kind of felt an odd connection with her. And all because she caught me crying over a dead rodent, and never told anyone.