Time passed relentlessly, and because I rarely slept, days seemingly didn’t end or begin, just rolled into one another. This illusion was facilitated by the fact that it was always dark and freezing cold. Bone-shatteringly cold. The chill had arrived in full force, dripped into you and clotted along the underside of your flesh. Snow covered everything like a second layer of skin; it clung to branches and gathered in clumps that looked like giant grey tumours. Most days, I shovelled the driveway at Mom’s request. I switched to the bike with the winter wheels. I liked to watch the blizzards from my bedroom window, or Dad’s office, remembering that thing in Ron Howard’s Grinch where he implies that each snowflake contains its own tiny universe. I liked to watch them smack against the ground, melt against the salt on the sidewalk. Splat, splat, splat.

Any gossip about me at school, imagined or otherwise, had seemingly stopped. I guess they’d all got their fill of my despair. Misery, when finite, is a fevered game of limit-pushing: running your finger quickly through a lighter flame or jabbing a knife in between your outstretched fingers. Something to get the adrenaline pumping. But when it gets to be too much, you can shut it off, catch your breath, and nothing’s lost. Turns out it’s a lot less fun when it’s not on a switch.

They’d all moved on. I figured I was supposed to as well. Two hours was enough to kill Dad, I guess, so why wasn’t two months enough to heal me? Two months, two lifetimes, two hundred Big Bangs.

And the texts. I’d waited to see if there was a follow-up, but there wasn’t. Even my anonymous harasser had got bored of me. I’d kept an eye on Bea just in case. She still refused to even acknowledge me, instead seeming angry when she accidentally caught my eye in Film. I wasn’t sure if she was able to hold a grudge for two years, or why that grudge was seemingly being exacerbated by the death of the target’s dad – but she was the only person I could think of who had enough history with me to have a motive. The ‘you will too’ reared its head at unexpected moments; I was surprised how much the words had actually unsettled me.

And June. If I hadn’t held her file in my own two hands, I might have been able to convince myself that I’d made the whole thing up. I barely saw her at school. Didn’t hear from her. Except for one time when I passed her in the hallway, and I swore she glanced over at me just before she walked into my blind spot. Other than that, though, she was just as distant as she’d been before I’d spoken a word to her.