I plop down next to her as the bus lurches into motion. I’m on the verge of telling her everything that happened last night, when she turns to me.

“I think Eliot Falkor has a stomach virus,” she says. “He’s not acting like himself. I think he may have a fever. I tried to take his temperature by sticking a thermometer under his armpit, but his armpit isn’t really an armpit, you know?”

I do know. Eliot Falkor is Germ’s iguana. He doesn’t completely have armpits.

Germ continues, talking faster than I can think, with her usual lack of decibel control. “Maybe he picked something up when I took him to the park yesterday. I thought he’d start barfing. I mean, I don’t think iguanas barf, but he was green. I mean, not the normal green but a pukey green. But I read this thing once in Reptile Enthusiast…”

I glance back at the other kids as they board the bus. Should I interrupt and say something? What if someone overhears?

“Did you watch the news last night, the thing about polar bears?” Germ is obsessed with the news. She lies awake worrying about it, or sometimes stomps around in anger about something she saw. It does seem, even to me, that things on the news are always getting worse.

She talks about polar bears as we pass the immense Seaport Civil War cemetery and Founders Square, which make up the center of our small town. “Sometimes I feel like the world is ending,” Germ goes on, and then enumerates why. By the time we get to school, she hasn’t paused for breath.

And so, before I know it, we’re at school and my secret is still bursting to get out. But in the light of the day, my fears are also beginning to fade a little. The more I look around at kids doing the things they do every day, and the bored face of the bus driver, and the cars converging on the school parking lot like always, the more it feels like last night was a strange dream, and impossible. I guess it feels like ghosts couldn’t possibly exist in a world where some kid just threw fish filet all over the front of the bus.

And then, as a last aside as we’re walking through the double doors into school, Germ says—a little awkwardly—that she’s doing a talent for the Fall Fling with Bibi West on Sunday night, and I nearly fall over my own feet.

Of all the things Germ and I are known for in our class, the biggest is that once, in second grade, I bit Bibi West because she called Germ “Germ Fartley” instead of her real name, Gemma Bartley. Germ is famous for then promptly adopting the nickname and introducing herself that way from then on. The cruelty of the nickname, though, was not an isolated incident.