You know that Leah girl? She was always a little weird, wasn’t she? they whispered to one another in the corridors. Didn’t have a lot of friends. Wasn’t really good at any of her subjects. Used to wear these hideous lumpy sweaters and invent dumb, childish games and go around nagging people to play them with her. An outcast. Nobody liked her much …

They spun their own stories about why it happened. I was lovesick, obsessed with him; I’d been annoying him for years now, forcing him to hang out with me, and finally he’d stopped tolerating it and rejected me outright, and that’s when I snapped.

The footage from the school’s cheap security cameras only cemented my guilt. From their angle, all you could see was me marching up to him and moving forward right as he fell back. There was no other logical explanation for why Cyrus Sui had stumbled on those steps. He was one of the best students in our gym class. He never faltered, never lost his balance to something as silly as gravity; he couldn’t have just tripped without some kind of trigger.

But none of that mattered as much as Cyrus himself accusing me of hurting him. Once the teachers heard his response, my fate was sealed.

My parents were the only ones who believed me. They defended me when the school claimed that I was violent, a threat to the other students. They comforted me when they found out that my expulsion would go straight into my records and raise the brows of any future admissions committees. My dad helped me throw out my old school uniform and began to search for a new school that would let me enroll in the middle of the year. My mom threatened to sue—the family legend goes that I will sue was the very first phrase she’d picked up after she immigrated to America—but even she had to admit the evidence was stacked against me, and by that point I just wanted to stop talking about it. Let my old life crumble off a cliff, let them whisper their lies behind my back. I knew I couldn’t go back to that place again, not ever. My name would forever be inextricably tied to the Incident, to Cyrus, to a crime I hadn’t committed. I promised myself I would never forgive him, even if he groveled at my feet.

I still refuse to forgive him, and yet—that was before the trip.

Before this.