Our new neighborhood is all right. I know that everyone here knows who I am and why I’m here. We didn’t go far enough to escape that. But people mostly just avoid me, and that’s fine with me so far. And Ava and Matthew take the bus to visit, and that is good.

I am doing community service at the library. When I got the job, the librarian, Miss Dorothy, told me I’d be a page.

“A Paige?” I repeated, dumbfounded.

“Yes, a page.” She smiled and told me the duties required.

There is a lot of work using hands: shelving the books, typing, sorting, so I mainly use my good one for that. I like the job. It’s relaxing and quiet—two things I now want more than anything else. Since Dee left the picture, I feel like the girl from The Exorcist, post-exorcism, without the pea soup. Maybe it’s the antidepressants, but the fire isn’t in me anymore. Sometimes I’ll get a little spark, a jolt of anger or sadness, but then it just fizzles out and I return to this life. A quiet life. I put aside books on the cart while I’m shelving them in case I want to sign them out later.

Once, a group of girls who had been huddled at a table whispered to me as I pushed by with a cart of books that needed reshelving.

“Are you that shooter girl?” one said, as her friend elbowed her, shushing her.

I stopped and looked at them. They were smiling nervously at me. They looked familiar, like so many kids I knew. Like me, like Lottie and Paige, like Marta and Ava. Like Dee.

“I used to be,” I said, then pushed the cart past them and into the stacks.

People stare at me out in public. Once, when I was walking to the library, a bunch of kids threw a cold coffee at me out a car window and yelled a miserable stream of insults. They missed, and after they drove off, I watched the ice cubes and coffee snake into the cracks in the sidewalk.

School started, but I’m taking a year off to be homeschooled. Mom and Dad and the therapist had long conversations about my recovery, and they found a tutor who is in university and who seems perfectly normal. She is so nice to me that I think I’ll look forward to my lessons, or at least won’t dread them. Her name is Amanda. She wears glasses and is studying kinesiology.