I whispered to him every loving thought in my head as his breathing slowed and eventually stopped, a puddle of urine spreading in the dirt as his muscles loosened.

If we buried every animal we had to put down, our whole yard would be a cemetery. We didn’t make an exception for Nerf. Mom had a deal with the mortuary to send animals there for cremation, so she and I picked up Nerf’s still-warm body and deposited it into a plastic bag. We said nothing as we took care of business—no words of farewell or anything—but after she and I went inside to wash up, Mom put her arms around me, and I sobbed inconsolably over that doofy dog.

That evening Mom went down to the Savannah Grill, which serves okay food but mainly functions as the town bar. She’d gone there the previous night, too, and I wondered whether she was meeting someone. Well, she was allowed. My dad hadn’t been in the picture since I was two, and Mom deserved to have some kind of social life.

I jumped at an unfamiliar sound: the office phone ringing.

“Hello, Mount Hope Veterinary Hospital,” I answered.

“Hey, Maggie,” Jordan said, and immediately I detected some sort of question mark in his voice.

“Hey, Jordan,” I said. “How’s your head feeling? You okay?”

“Yeah, sure, weirdly. You want the good news or bad news first?”

“Does this involve our ice-cream date tonight?”

“No.”

“Then bad news first.”

“Okay, but first some good news: The phones are working again.”

I laughed, pacing the office floor. “No shit.”

“Landlines only and no long-distance, but still.”

“Right, and the nonfunctioning cellular networks are the bad news.”

“No, the bad news is I got suspended from school.”

“Wait, what?” I stopped pacing. “School hasn’t even started yet.”

“I know, and the suspension starts immediately and will be over by the time classes begin next week, so it’s kind of bullshit. But here’s the thing: I got in a fight in the locker room.”

“Right after I saw you? When you were going back there to recuperate from that …?” The image flashed in my mind and stirred up my stomach: Jordan flying, taking a brutal head shot, and crashing to the ground.

“That would be when,” he said.

“You’ve got to be kidding. Have you ever even been in a fight? Who were you fighting?”

“Troy Cameron and Luke Bowman.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” I don’t drop many f-bombs, but with those two thugs, this couldn’t have ended well. “Are you okay? Did you get in any good shots at least? Are you in the hospital?”

“Someone is,” he responded, and let out the weirdest little laugh.

I tried to process all of this. He certainly sounded okay.

“All right, Jordan, what gives?” I asked. “How big of a brawl was this, and how did you survive?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” he said. “It was the two of them against me. But this was the kind of fight that you fantasize about.”