Mom, meanwhile, hasn’t tired of telling the media to fuck off her property, away from the hospital, off the phone, telling them it’s their fault this all happened, as though I’m Lady Diana and they’re the paparazzi. She wants to start a group for parents who want to learn about digital literacy, and I just can’t wait for her to tell me that I should really change my passwords regularly.

“I broke up with Reg, honey,” she says one day, two weeks after, surprising me out of a nap.

“Oh yeah?” I say, sleepily, finding my voice out of the fog of painkillers.

“Yeah,” she says, rubbing the fingers on my good hand. “Who needs the hassle.” She waves a hand in forced carelessness.

And then I say the thing I say all the time. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for making it hard for you.”

“Oh, never mind. It’s not the right time for dating!” she says, overly cheerfully. Then she pauses. “I want to spend all my time with you, Stevie.” Her voice is breaking now, and her hand is squeezing mine. “I’m going to suffocate you with love until it drives you crazy. Well. Not crazy crazy, but, you know.”

I laugh a little and nod.

I am protected because I’m a juvenile, or what they call a young offender. The press won’t print my name because of this, but that doesn’t matter. Everyone knows my name. Everyone knows that I have a mole beside my belly button. Everyone has seen the photos. But I am protected from worse, I guess. Not charged as an adult. Saved from prison. I will spend a month of days at a juvie center once I’m recovered from my injuries, plus what works out to about a year of community service. There they will work with me on my mental health, on my regret, on pain, I’m told. There will be other girls there who have committed crimes, and we will do group therapy together. It feels so far away from where I am now that I don’t think about it.

I’m still in that criminal no-man’s-land between childhood and adulthood, where kid games nod to sexual violence, where braided hair passes self-harm in the hallway. There won’t be a trial, because I pled guilty. Guilty of mischief, assault, but not attempted murder, which no one charged me with. It was a botched teenage suicide, a girl whose mind was bent by trauma in a moment of desperation. Bent and mangled. Like my bike. It was an accident, they say. I won’t be sent to jail but have been given a lifetime sentence of shame, or so it looks from here.