By the end of third period—where no one had spoken to him at all, it was as if he’d been invisible—it was clear David was about to fall apart, or internally combust, there was nothing to stop it. He opened his locker, where he’d first seen the symbol the week before, and slammed his right hand in the door, and the fact that four people saw him do it meant nothing and everything, it was both not enough and far too many. He let his fucked-up hand carry him through the rest of the day, letting its insistent pain guide his thoughts, and steadily his fingers took on a gnarled, tree-like aspect and became a horrible red. He let this be his excuse whenever someone looked at him the wrong way. Even Beth—on whom he maintained a low-key crush and with whom he’d always been moderate to mild friends, or at least they’d remained friendly after he and Sarah broke up—when he saw her during fifth period, a nasty-looking bruise on her neck, he’d raised his mangled hand in acknowledgment of their shared pain, and she turned away visibly disgusted, and by this base failure of empathy (neck bruise for fucked-up hand), he was finished. Between sixth and seventh period he went into a bathroom stall—incidentally the same one in which Greg had deposited his blood the week before—and rolled his knuckles between the edge of the door and the stall until he heard a nauseating crack, thinking as he did so that this probably nullified the performance of any hobby that might bring relief from this garbage day, and taking this as part of his punishment as well.