“Bye,” I said.

I walked slowly back to the bench and sat down between my parents.

“You okay?” Dad said.

The question threw me. “I don’t know.”

“Say more,” Mom said.

Couldn’t they just punish me or yell at me? “Can we do this later?”

“No,” Mom said. “We can’t.”

“Fine. I feel like I won’t ever be able to fix this,” I said to my shoes.

“Didn’t you just fix it?” she said. “If you didn’t deserve to win, you shouldn’t have, and you made sure you didn’t. What else is there to do?”

“But I still feel so…” There was no word for how bad I felt.

“I bet,” Dad said. “Did I ever tell you about that time I shoplifted?”

My head snapped up. “No.”

“I was seven. G-mare said she wasn’t going to buy me any more comics. She thought they were dumb, and they just piled up around the house. And I was obsessed with this superhero series, Secret Wars. Anyway, there was a new one out, and I just had to have it. It seems silly now, but then, I don’t know. I was at the newsstand, and I just took it.”

“Did you get caught?”

“More like I cracked. Uncle Philippe saw me with it and asked how I got it. I think I was actually dying to get it off my chest. He made me take it back and apologize to the owner. Thirty years later, I still remember exactly what that felt like.”

“Did Uncle Philippe tell G-mare?”

“Nope.”

“Yeah, see, that was just you and Uncle Philippe and the guy who owned the newsstand. You apologized, and you moved on. G-mare, Uncle Philippe, the whole world is going to know what I did, and I will never get past it.”

“It will blow over in no time. You’ll see. It’s gonna to be fine.” Dad waved me off like I’d spilled something, like it was nothing a roll of paper towels couldn’t make disappear.

Something inside me that had been ripping little by little tore wide open. “No, it’s not gonna be fine!” I shouted. “It’s not fine if they show me on television saying I cheated, if the whole world finds out that I’m a liar. That’s not fine! The Doughnut Stop is not fine! Mom’s restaurant is not fine! Petersville is not fine! So just stop saying it is.”

“Tris, I told you—” Mom started.

“I know what you said. But I can see things aren’t fine, and I don’t want to waste time pretending they are. That doesn’t help.”

Dad pinched his chin and gave me a long, hard look. “Okay.”

“Okay?” I felt like I’d been running hard at a wall bracing for impact, and the wall had just moved, and now I was falling.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

“Everything,” I said. “And start from the beginning.”

And they did. And it wasn’t anything I didn’t already know, but that was never the point.