Although my mother’s books on adolescence and grief counsel otherwise, I don’t go to school for a week. I do my physics and calculus at home and send it in with my mother. Scot treats me like a cancer patient. He’ll be watching a baseball game, yelling at the TV, and pounding the arms of his chair. I walk by, and he mutes the volume and looks sorrowful. He hopes I won’t talk to him. A lot of people are like that. They don’t want to feel inadequate.

When I do return to school, the kids leave a four-foot buffer zone around me, as if they’re afraid they might catch it. But then by day two, Grimshaw’s murder gets eclipsed by the prom. It’s an all-night, nonalcoholic, locked-in-the-gym affair, and the halls are abuzz with schemes for smuggling in alcohol. In the ten days since her death, I still haven’t cried, and of course Mom is worried. So she sends Pastor Don down to get me out of class so that we can “talk.” It means getting out of school before lunch on a nice day, so I go along with him in his car to the church.

“It’s too nice a day to be inside,” Pastor Don declares. “Let’s take a walk.”

“I know a place we can go,” I suggest. We drive in silence past the drinking places and all the former dairy farms. I show him a place to pull over, and we cross the road and thread through rusty barbed wire and walk up the edge of one of Mizerak’s alfalfa pastures. At the top where the woods begin is a deep little ravine cut by the same stream that runs behind Grimshaw’s. From here, it goes past all the party places in the gorge and on down through Colchis, and keeps going until it ends up in the Mississippi River. We stand at the top and look into the ravine. Down near the bottom, there’s still the crusty remnant of a snowbank.

“My goodness,” says Pastor Don. “Snow. In June! I had no idea.” We sit on either side of a big flat rock. A silence sits between us, like a third person that was already there before us. But he is here for me, and he needs to be talked to, otherwise my mother will send more specialists after me. I decide to make it easy for him.

“So,” I start. “Do you want to know how I feel?”

“Yes,” he says. “I do.”

“Okay, I’ll tell you. On one condition. Nothing you can say, no Bible verse you can quote, no heartwarming anecdote you can relate, will make me feel any different. So don’t bother. Agreed?”

“Okay,” he says doubtfully. He waits for a minute. “So,” he prompts, “how do you feel?”

“Guilty.”