No one comes over to ask if I’m all right. The older kids have already forgotten while my classmates whisper and point, because I’m the weird girl, now.

I walk to the bathroom and stare at the mirror, and then I scream again, except it’s not words this time. It’s just noise, and it echoes off the walls. I don’t care who hears. I scream until my throat is sore, and then I do it again, feeling the burn of something I can’t put out.

I want to punch my reflection and watch it crack. I want to shout in the face of every teacher who tells me I’m quieter than I used to be. I want to be happy again.

But it’s like what Mum used to tell Will: “Want doesn’t get.”

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He wasn’t pretending. Logan is Will. He’s in fifth grade, now, and this isn’t a nightmare I’m going to wake up from. It’s my life.

We all broke him, but Mum did it the most. She brainwashed him, and what’s left is a dress-up game that lasts forever.

Dad hates it. You can see it every time Mum says their dead son’s name. He flinches, and part of me wants to hug him better, but I don’t because he’s weak. He had the chance to stop this, and he didn’t.

If I disappeared, would Mum replace me too?

The knots of our family unraveled years ago. Now the only knots are the ones in my stomach and the one wrapped tightly around the truth.

Years are strange things. They can stretch for an eternity or disappear in a blink, and that’s what happened to us…both at once.

So many times, I nearly said it; so many times the words started to come, the silent sound of a confession before it’s uttered; and so many times I stopped myself because of Mum…and Dad…and Logan.

I should say me as well. I should say that, for all my desire to tell the truth, I couldn’t take a hammer to my life. When I was a kid, I might have. But now, knowing what I know, it’s a step too far. I’ve been feeling guilty for years and, at some point, I stopped wanting to confess and understood that the consequences were far greater than the pain.

What I didn’t realize was that Dad was going the other way. I went from guilt-ridden to numb right about the time he finally stood up to my mother.

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Pippa doesn’t know me as the screaming girl. She and her friends think I’m cool, and they run over to me at break and lunch and talk about their dramas.