The question catches me off guard. Once I had an easy answer, but not anymore. “I’ve always felt a need to help people. It gets to be too much, though, particularly when they’re in real trouble and you don’t know if you can make a difference, no matter how hard you try.”

“Yes,” he says. “That’s how I feel right now.”

—

Before I leave, I ask him to show me Cameron’s locker, which is just a row over from where mine once was. Will’s team has cut off the lock and taken nearly everything. Only her textbooks remain, Algebra II, Beginning Latin, World History, and a ragged paperback of Jane Eyre.

“We’d just started our unit on it,” Steve Gonzales says beside me. Down the hall, a janitor rides a clunky floor polisher around and around in circles, the patterns behind him like glassy, disconnected bull’s-eyes. “Girls like Cameron love Jane.”

“I did too,” I say, feeling a current of connection. “Jane has every reason to feel like a victim, but she’s not. She’s quiet, she’s interior, but a fighter for sure.”

I pick up the paperback to take with me, and then move the stack of books aside. In the lower-right corner of the back of the locker, somewhere only Cameron can see it easily, she’s taped a blank postcard with a poem from Rainer Maria Rilke, the whole poem line by line in her steady, neat hand.

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough

to make every minute holy.

I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough

just to lie before you like a thing,

shrewd and secretive.

I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,

as it goes toward action,

and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times

when something is coming near,

I want to be with those who know secret things

or else alone.

I want to be a mirror for your whole body,

and I never want to be blind, or to be too old

to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.

I want to unfold.

I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,

because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

(twenty-three)

In Patterson’s, as I wait for Will, I scan Jane Eyre feeling uneasy for some reason, as if I’m peering into Cameron’s diary, or trespassing on sacred ground. Books can be incredibly personal to people, even holy. This one seems to be for her, worn soft and dog-eared, full of underlined passages and pencil marks—a coded map to her soul. I have the postcard with the Rilke poem, too, and copy it out in my notebook, circling phrases that feel meaningful. I am too alone in the world…something is coming near…those who know secret things…