Lennon and I make it to the field on time for PE, so we don’t have to run extra laps. We start off at a jog. I hope the strain on my lungs will distract me from searching for Shy on the practice field.

It doesn’t.

“Looking for Shy?” Lennon asks.

Maybe I should be a little more concerned about how much she’s keeping an eye on me.

“He asked me to lunch,” I explain. “But he wasn’t in class after.”

“He left with Natalie,” she says.

So I’d been right to think he might have left with another girl—I’d just thought of the wrong one. I don’t want to think about what it means that they haven’t returned, so I turn my thoughts toward a theory I’d been contemplating since this morning.

“Do you think Natalie had anything to do with posting Lily’s texts on Roundtable?”

Lennon laughs, but it sounds a little strangled, as if she choked on the spit in her throat. “No.”

“Why not?” I’m a little offended by how quickly she shoots my suggestion down.

“Because Natalie and Lily are friends.”

“Really?”

“There’s a group of them. They grew up together—Shy, Lily, Natalie, Jacobi, Thane.”

Thane?

“Shy and Thane don’t seem like very good friends.”

“They aren’t—or at least, not anymore.”

“What happened?”

“No one knows. One day, they came to school and they just weren’t friends anymore. Didn’t hang out at lunch, didn’t talk in the hallway, didn’t acknowledge their history together.”

I can’t imagine Shy and Thane ever being very good friends, but now I’m curious—what changed? If I have to guess, it has something to do with the grief Thane carries. Death always inspires change—good or bad.

Lennon and I slow to a walk.

“You’re coming to the game Friday, right?” Lennon moves on to another subject, obviously not as interested in Shy and Thane’s relationship as I am. “We could get ready together. It’ll be fun! Besides, you’ll get to see Shy play, and trust me, you don’t want to miss that.”

I smile because of how normal she sounds—how innocent. She isn’t plagued by the dead, by threads or golden coins. I wish I knew what it was like to move through the world as she does. I had once—before things got complicated. I had dreams of attending Princeton or Harvard. I had already started reading about women in space—Sally Ride, Valentina Tereshkova, and Geraldyn Cobb—and studying cosmology, relativity, and gravity. Those dreams were brittle, though, the glass thin, and everything shattered.

Now my plans revolve around hiding. Even now, knowing another mistake means a mental hospital, I have an escape plan.

“Anora?”

My gaze snaps to Lennon. “I’ll ask my mom.”

Her smile widens, and we continue our laps around the field.