I whipped around then, anger simmering in my throat. He looked so ridiculously pleased with himself, like infuriating me was a contest and he had just been crowned the ultimate victor. Then something fluttered out from the pages of my books. It was an ad of some kind for a lobster restaurant, printed on cheap pink paper. I only needed to take one glance at it to know who had put it there. “Are you serious? Now you’re putting trash in my things for fun? Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“The word trash is really subjective,” he began, but I was sick of it already, sick of him. Everywhere I turned, he was there, ready to laugh at me, to pull another prank, to make my life unbearable. It was bad enough that none of the other kids really liked me, but at least they didn’t go out of their way to torment me the way he did.

“Oh my god, just go, Cyrus,” I snapped at him, stomping forward until we were face-to-face. He’d been unfairly blessed with another growth spurt over the summer, and he was one of the only boys in our class who was taller than me, even if it was just by an inch. “I hate you. I never want to see you again.”

I braced myself for him to laugh in my face, because he never took anything seriously anyway, but he just blinked, frozen to the spot, something sharp flashing across his eyes like the edge of shattered glass. Then the bell rang, and he seemed a little dazed as he started to walk up the stairs again—but his feet slipped on the next step, and he stumbled. Instinctively, my hands shot out to help him, but it was too late.

Someone screamed as he fell from the top of the stairs. Their scream was so piercing that I thought he was already dead, and in my head I saw a sped-up reel of terrible images, the red-and-blue sirens of the ambulance, the puddles of blood, his parents sobbing outside the school gates.

Later, they all agreed it was a miracle that he hadn’t broken any bones. He did have a concussion, but it took only two weeks for him to recover from the fall. It would take two years for me to fully recover from the fallout.

They also all agreed on this: I had pushed him.

Everyone there had witnessed it. Supposedly, we had been arguing, and in a blaze of rage, my arms had shot out to shove him down the flight of stairs. They spared no detail in describing the way my expression had twisted with fury, how I had hissed his name. Some claimed that I had insulted him outright by calling him trash.

It made sense to them, because of who I was.