My uncle Terry always tells me not to panic. He says that childhood and adolescence aren’t for everyone, and that as long as I keep plowing forward, my life will eventually make sense. He claims that once I escape the small-worldness of middle school and high school—once I get to college—I’ll find people more like myself. I’ll recognize my species. I’ll get happy.

Uncle Terry was a brilliant student as a kid, but he was picked on mercilessly for being geeky—and he got through it. And now he’s a successful, well-respected man with a hot wife. He likes to tell me that a lot of the kids who picked on him in school got married right away and started having babies and getting fat and working dead-end jobs, and the best parts of their lives were over.

High school, Uncle Terry’s low point, had been their highest high. He says it gives him untold joy to run into them now, all these years later. He is not above smirking.

I’m not a genius like him, and I’ve never really been tormented like he was either. I’ve mostly just been ignored. Until now, at least.

Now I cowered in bed half-expecting an angry mob of popular kids to burst in and drag me screaming from my room to avenge one of their own kind. I could picture all the thugs from the team armed with sports equipment, and Sarah’s girlfriends wielding blow-dryers, singing the school fight song while ripping out my throat.

I had tons of studying to do, but I dug deeper under my blankets to postpone the coming day—to stall the rest of the weekend, the following week, the next months, the many years until graduation.

Katie

Eventually Mum and I calmed down and realized how silly we must have looked. Me, almost a grown woman, curled up in Mum’s lap like a gigantic baby. Both of us on the kitchen floor, half under the table. The chair I’d been sitting on lying on its side. The kettle whistling its head off.

No, no, no, no. Of course Rob wasn’t dead. No, I didn’t have any idea where he was. I’d just thought…for that one minute…it had all reminded me of when the call came about Dad. It had been the same time of day. The same kitchen…

Slowly we got up, brushed ourselves off, and tried to act normal. We made toast and tea, and sat across from each other. But neither of us ate or drank.

“I wonder why Rob’s mum called HERE,” I said. Rob and I hadn’t really been close in ages.

“She probably called everywhere she could think of,” Mum said. “Poor woman must be terrified.”

Then Mum asked if I had any idea why Rob would stay away all night. She asked me if he had a girlfriend.