Doc waited for me with his soft and safe eyes encouraging me, and I wanted to tell him. Not about the secret I’d sent in, but the one I couldn’t. I wanted to say that I didn’t put my real secret down because I didn’t know how to face it, fix it, but the pressure of everyone else being there—knowing and hearing—hardened me. I felt it first as a tightening on my skin, a stillness of my eyes, and then the quickset cementing of my jaw. And the answer I gave wasn’t about my own secret, but about Kori’s, Mom’s. “You send it because you want to keep doing it.”

“Okay, spoken like a woman with very good secrets.” The pressure lifted as Doc turned back to the class. “So, here we have another view—confession leads to acceptance. Once you’ve let it out, you can guiltlessly continue your questionable practices. Why is it safe to continue?”

Doc had turned back to me, and now I was so safely entrenched in my hard shell, the words came easy. “Because my beloved little card, all decorated and poetic, now has everybody’s prayers and hugs and warm fuzzies. Not only do I do it and do it anonymously, but now you tell me—I understand. I agree. Me too. Don’t feel bad. It’s normal.”

Doc thought about it and nodded. “The dirty little secret is now embraced. It is acceptable behavior.”

“Um, I disagree.”

“Wonderful, state your opinion, Cole.”

“I don’t think eating your boogers will ever be acceptable behavior.”

“All we can do is hope,” Doc said with a smile, and everybody laughed.

Everyone except me.

I stewed about Mom and her married lover through the rest of the class. And as the bell rang and Doc gave me a pat on the shoulder it hit me. He wanted to meet my mother. A big, real smile that didn’t even feel stretched or awkward spread over my face. “Hey, Doc? Did you really mean that about wanting to get to know our parents?”

He nodded.

“How would you like to come to dinner on Saturday?”

There was a look in Kori’s eyes that day in eighth grade when I came rushing into the bathroom. It was a look I’d later come to know as playful. But playful in the way Mrs. Patterson’s cats liked to play with little field mice before eviscerating them for sport.

After everything with Kori and my mom, I felt like one of those little field mice.

Toyed with and tortured.

I’d always thought my unlikely friendship with Kori was fate’s way of making amends for all the other crappy things it had dealt me. But after fate had ripped her from me, I realized just how cruel it could be. You couldn’t tempt it, you couldn’t change it.