Bryce’s smirk follows Adam as he slumps down into his seat and then Bryce turns back around to laugh with Justin. They’re both idiots. I know that they’re my teammates and all, but they bug the hell out of me sometimes. I can feel Bryce’s stupid, shiny victory and I have to push against the impulse to laugh with him. His self-satisfaction pokes out the corners of my gut—it doesn’t fit and I know it’s because I’m not letting it fit. I don’t want to be a part of this, but his dumb feelings are making themselves known to me whether I like it or not.

The rest of the class passes in a haze as the black sludge creeps in on me once more, but with an extra stomach-dropping edge to it. Usually it’s dark and heavy and oppressive and all of that sucks, but this is worse somehow. It’s not dark, it’s … the absence of light. Like some sort of void. It doesn’t weigh down on me, suffocate me. It’s empty—just total nothingness. But it’s sucking me in and I feel like if I go inside of it I’ll stop existing entirely, and that scares me, but at the same time it would be a relief.

The bell rings.

“All right, everybody, nicely done today,” Mr. Collins says with a clap of his hands as he stands up to open the door. “Have a good weekend. Mine will be spent reading your Macbeth papers, so, for my sake, I hope you made them interesting.”

“Shakespeare is always interesting, Mr. Collins,” Caitlin quips as she breezes past him, Jessica rolling her eyes as she leads the way out of the classroom.

“See, that’s the kind of quality brown-nosing you all should aspire to,” Mr. Collins says enthusiastically. “Nicely done, Ms. Park.”

“I do what I can,” she responds, not even looking back as she walks through the door.

I’m stuck in my seat, concentrating on not getting sucked into Adam’s black hole. I’m facing the front of the class but I can feel him angrily shoving his books into his backpack behind me. I try to focus on my own annoyance instead of Adam’s feelings. This keeps happening—he feels sad or angry or whatever and somehow I end up carrying all of that and it’s so fucking unfair. Why can’t he just push everything down like everybody else?

Adam gets up and rushes out of the classroom, expertly avoiding the leg that Bryce had stuck out to trip him. I mentally cross my fingers that Adam will take the void with him, but I know it’s a hollow wish. I’m caught in his orbit and it’s going to take me the rest of the day to shake this off.