“Mrs. Pentz would like to see Serena. She says it’s important.”

Mlle. O’Shea looks at me sadly, her hands clasped in mock disappointment, and asks me what I’ve done now. “Oh, ma fille. Qu’est-ce que t’as fait maintenant?”

“Sais pas, eh, moi?” I shrug, getting up out of my chair.

Mlle. O’Shea laughs and claps. “Très bien fait!” We’ve been watching French films, and I’ve been practicing my gestures in class—the shrugging, the hands, the attitude. It’s almost the end of the period, so I gather up my books and bring them with me. I follow Mrs. Kmiec down the hall, as if I need her to lead the way. We go past the open doors of the classrooms and hear the teachers’ voices droning like bumblebees in the summer, and we go past the miles of empty lockers, down the stairs, around the corner by the vending machines where the portraits of all the past principals of Colchis High hang, all the way to Mr. Van. When I come into her office, Mom is facing the window overlooking the parking lot.

“You should put your portrait up there,” I tell her when I come in. “Next to Mr. Van’s.” She turns around, and her face is puffy and tearstained. She’s twisting her wedding ring around and around. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, Serena. Something really terrible has happened.” She starts to cry. Her tears don’t instinctively alarm me. She’s always cried fairly easily, and what is terrible to her is rarely terrible to me. I prepare myself to fake the shock of learning about Scot’s long-standing affair with Nanci Lee, although why she had to pull me out of class to tell me, I don’t know. I’ll tell her what I’ve learned recently about Grimshaw, that some people fit together and some people don’t, that absence and loss can either be an ache or an opportunity.

“Look at you,” she cries. “I wish I could express how very proud of you I am.”

“Why? What happened?” I ask.

Gripping the back of her chair, she closes her eyes for a few seconds. “Amen,” she whispers. She opens her eyes. She sits on her couch and pats the cushion next to her. I sit.

“Serena. It’s about Melody. Grimshaw.” She takes a breath. “Melody Grimshaw is …”

“Dead.” We both say it at the same time. I don’t know why I say it, because it’s obviously not true, but it just seemed like how that sentence was going to end. So I stare at my mother, waiting for her to tell me what’s really going on. She stares back at me. She takes both my hands and tells me that there was an incident in a motel room. She starts talking to me about shock and grief and bereavement, about counselors and all the help that’s there for me, while I’m still waiting for her to break the news about Scot and Nanci Lee.