I glance over at him, and he has the expression of a boy who just saw someone kick his kitten. All the fight drains out of me. I slump down in my seat and sigh. “Sorry.” I push my hand through my hair. “I’m not good at this.”

“At what?”

“Like, generally speaking, talking to people.”

“Yeah, well. Me either. Like I said last night, I’m out of practice.”

I give a little laugh. “You think you’re out of practice? Last year I basically spoke to five people, total.”

He glances at me as he puts the car into drive. “Yeah…Why weren’t you in school until this semester?” He winces. “Is that a dumb question? Obviously it makes sense you wouldn’t want to go back….”

I sigh. “Look, the reason I wasn’t in school is pretty much common knowledge. You could ask almost anyone from my old school and they’d be able to tell you.”

He raises his eyebrows, questioning.

I sigh. “Okay, well, after the stuff that happened last year, I was really angry….”

“You had every right—”

I hold up my hand, stopping him. “Let me finish, okay?”

Zach nods. He turns the car onto a side street. The road is dark and nearly deserted.

I look out my window, away from him, into the night. “Like I said. After everything last year, I was angry.” I close my eyes for a moment, try to remember to breathe.

“And when they reopened school, everyone wanted to be my friend all of a sudden—people who’d never talked to me before would come up to me in the halls all May, are you okay, how are you doing, blah blah blah—like they wanted to feed off what happened to me, make it more their own. It was disgusting. I started getting into fights. Like, a lot of fights. Principal Rose-Brady gave me a ton of chances, because…well, you know. Everyone felt sorry for me.

“So yeah. I was skipping class all the time. Fighting a lot. It’s not like I was just randomly kicking people’s asses, though, you know. I was trying to help people. To stand up for people who needed someone on their side. That’s what no one seems to understand. I was trying to defend people who needed help, even if they didn’t think they did. I owed the world that much. But Rose-Brady didn’t see it that way. All she saw was me punching this asshole in the face after he tried to join the shitty grief group they set up at school….She wouldn’t even listen to why I did it. How messed up is that?” My hands are shaking in my lap.