“How fucking dare you?” said Wynezra. She was shaking her head and pinching her mouth into something small and ugly. I mean, it was my head and my mouth, but it was her pain, and she owned it like it was her only possession. “You don’t get to make my decisions. You don’t get to fix anything. Stay the fuck out of my life.”

Wynezra stormed off. Thunderous. Pluming with rage.

“Wynonna, wait—”

I tried to grab her shoulder.

She reacted like a spasm. Swung at my arm like a baseball batter, knocking my hand out of the park. Then both of her palms shoved me square in the chest.

For the briefest moment, I was airborne. No part of me was touching the ground. I was a leaf in the wind.

Then I was flat on my back. Stunned. Disoriented. Staring at the speckled ceiling like a galaxy. Leaf in the wind, my ass.

At first, I felt nothing.

Then I felt fire—in my chest, in my arm, in my spine, the back of my skull, everywhere.

It took me a second to relearn how to breathe. When I did, I blinked, craning my neck in manageable directions. There were heads and eyes everywhere, and they were all looking at me.

Well, half of them were looking at me. The other half were looking at Ezra Slevin, who, in turn, was glancing between her powerful hands and me—the girl she had knocked over like I was made of cards.

She looked horrified.

She looked devastated.

She rushed off as quickly as she could—disappeared from my rather limited field of vision—while I tried to not-die.

Honestly, not-dying was the least of my concerns.

I looked everywhere for Wynezra.

But she was nowhere.

By fifth period, I hated myself.

By sixth period, I was thinking suicidal thoughts. Nothing concrete or calculated or planned. It was chaotic. Desperate. A relentless thought spiral that went something like this:

I hate myself, I want to die.

I hate myself, I want to die.

I hate myself, I want to die.

I knew I wouldn’t actually harm myself. But if I did happen to just… cease to exist… it would have felt like a mercy.

By seventh period, my life was a building on fire, and I needed to escape it, or I was going to die. I could barely even breathe.

I skipped seventh period.

I found a dark, unused classroom. I wasn’t even sure whose classroom it was, or why it was empty, or where I even was. I only knew that I needed it.

I closed the door, immersing myself in pitch-blackness.

With the light of my phone, I pulled out a pair of Wynonna’s headphones. They weren’t noise-canceling, but they would have to do.

I plugged them into Wynonna’s phone, pulled up Sufjan Stevens’s “Chicago,” and pressed play.