“No,” he says. “I’m not.” He opens the door and Julia follows him. The other students are quiet, but several come up and embrace him. These aren’t kids Ned is close to, but in Lakehaven, a staggeringly high number of them have known one another since elementary school, and so there is a familiarity, a comfort. Ned doesn’t cry. Julia does.

And then Mrs. McPherson calls the class to order, tells Ned how sorry she is, if he needs to excuse himself from class, it’s fine, and that they’ll continue with their discussion of the assigned reading. Julia loves Mrs. McPherson. She is her favorite teacher. Mrs. McPherson keeps it a normal class, mostly, and Julia sees the gratitude in Ned’s face. The smile she used to wish she could see. The Ned she thought she knew.

They don’t have second period together, and they part ways, then reunite for third, which is varsity chorale. They sing after the choir director tells Ned how sorry she is and remembers the times Danielle volunteered to hand out programs before the concerts, or helped with the costumes for the spring musical, or chaperoned the kids during the all-region choir auditions. People don’t much feel like singing after this, but they do, and the choir director sensibly has them focus on the more somber songs for the upcoming spring concert. Julia, with the altos, glances at Ned again and again, surrounded by his fellow tenors, but he doesn’t look her way. He just looks numb now, and she wonders if he wants to go home.

Fourth period she has AP physics and he has Spanish—and this is finally where some idiot asks her what it was like to find a body and she freezes him with a stare, glad that Ned is not there—and then their lunch period. By the time she’s gone through one of the lines to get a salad and bottled water, he’s sitting at a table, surrounded by Julia’s friends, who texted her after the murder, the same ones who teased her for becoming sweet on Ned, and now they’re butterflying around him like he’s a blooming flower.

She puts her salad and bottled water down across from him. “Go. Now,” she says, and the girls almost seem ready to argue.

“Now he’s interesting? Go,” she says again, and that time it’s enough. They wander off.

“Are you saying your friends didn’t think I was interesting before?” The old smile of the old Ned, back for a moment.

“I am. Are you tired of people asking you how you are?” She pokes at her salad to spare him the penetrating gaze she wants to give him.