“Oh, you’ll find it.” He holds out his hand for me to shake, and I take it. I don’t want the yearbook, of course—the document that officially makes my best friend nonexistent forever, but he looks so miserable and guilty that I can’t bring myself to leave it there. It’s not his fault. He walks me to the door.

“Whatever your next step is,” he stammers. “Whatever you decide you want it to be, just let me know, and I’ll do whatever I can to help you achieve it.” His eyes are still wet and red from crying. “Not that you need it.”

“Thanks, Mr. C.”

I turn around and wave good-bye to him, walking backward.

“I’ll be here,” he calls after me.

And then that’s it for me and high school. On my way out, I open the envelope with my grades in it. Six A’s, in a vertical row, like a monogram, like an inheritance. I should have known. Now they don’t seem like the result of a year’s hard work. They seem like the inevitable product of the monogrammed silver. Now that I know about the P’s on the silver, it seems that there’s nothing in my life that they don’t explain. Or Grimshaw’s.

I put the yearbook and my grades in a trash can at the end of the hall.

Next to the trash, there is a window that overlooks the town of Colchis. Before I go down the stairs and out into my rosy future, I stop and put my forehead against the glass. The trees create a solid quilt of green that covers everything in the town—streets, houses, cars, the park, the people … Under it, everything is hidden, at least from here. I could be angry at this town, I could make a case that it killed her. I could hate. I could hate Colchis, hate Colchis High School, hate Mr. C., the church, Scot, Nanci Lee, the cheerleaders, Mike Lyle, my mother, even myself … but there’s no point. What erased her is so much bigger than all this, bigger than all of us. Behind me the high school is filled with the silence of summer, which also erases everything. Hating is stupid. What do I have to be angry about? I’m one of the winners, if I want to be, and like Junior Davis says about Vince Lombardi: winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. It’s all up to me.

But I’m still angry, and I still want to do something.