I used to tell myself I’m only a seventh-grade mentor to tick the school’s volunteering requirement box in my planner, but the truth is different. If Will was alive, he would only be a couple of years younger than them, so this is a glimpse into a future we’ll never have.

Logan talks in riddles and walks on eggshells, but Pippa and her friends are carefree and I feel light when I’m with them.

You only need to meet once a week, and you only get one mentee each. But Pippa’s friends have adopted me, or I’ve adopted them, and we talk every day.

I wish I’d had a mentor when I was eleven. Maybe they could have stopped the screams and got me to speak the truth before it became too heavy to lift.

Pippa doesn’t talk to me like a big sister. She already has one of those, so she speaks to me as a friend. They all do, although they do most of the talking.

On the school field, surrounded by seventh graders who think I’m so much cooler than I am, the world feels a little bit better. But, at parties, surrounded by people my own age, it’s as if I’ve wandered into someone else’s story.

It’s another form of escape, but I don’t enjoy it. I want to lose myself in the night like the strangers who used to be my friends, but I’m always on the outside. I watch Pippa’s sister Evie, who is in the year above me, and I watch Nia, whose replacement friends have shrunk to just two. I watch them, but I never join in, because what would I say? They don’t ignore me. They just don’t realize I’m there.

My homeroom teacher, Mrs. Strauss, is sort of the reason I go. She told my parents she was concerned about my lack of “positive peer relationships” and asked me where the “bubbly freshman” went.

That girl is trapped inside other people’s quotation marks. She died along with her brother. But I couldn’t tell her that, so I go to the parties, and Mum seems happy that I’m keeping up appearances.

IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII IIII

It’s on the fifth anniversary of Will’s death that Dad says, “I can’t do this anymore.” If “anniversary” is the right word, because I used to think that was only for things you celebrated, not nightmares you’ll never forget.

Mum curls her lip the way she does when she’s getting ready for a fight, and I want to leave, but my legs won’t move.

“You can’t do what anymore?” she spits.

“This, Jane. I can’t do this. We have to give him back.”