She’s not the girl with the long blond hair I saw Ty dancing with that night.

Wrong Ashley.

I let out the breath I was holding. “That’s me,” I say to answer her previous question. I hand over her biology notebook and straighten up.

“Is this . . . mine?” she asks, and I see she’s got the envelope from Ty, frowning now because there’s her name written right on it.

I snatch it out of her hand. “No. It’s mine.” And with no more explanation, I’m on my feet, heading off at a half jog because I’m late, too. For English. For Ty.

For everything. I’m too late.

7.

STEVEN IS IN MY ENGLISH CLASS. Of course he is—Steven and Eleanor and Beaker are in all my honors classes. There was a time when that was a good thing, a great thing, even. But not today. I’m five minutes late, but the desk I usually sit at, the one on the far right between Steven and Beaker and in front of El, is still empty. Waiting for me. Steven looks up and smiles, and I feel my face heating again, thinking about the rose.

Crap.

Mrs. Blackburn stops talking and stares at me from her perch at the edge of her desk, puzzled by my highly unusual tardiness.

“Sorry,” I mumble, and then I slink to the back of the classroom and find a seat on the left. I can’t deal with my friends right now.

Especially Steven.

Mrs. Blackburn continues the lecture she was giving. She’s starting us on an exercise in etymology, she says—the study of the origin of words. She shows us a website where you can type in any word and it will spit out the word’s roots: its definition, where and how that word originated, and how the usage of the word changed over time. In conjunction with our Heart of Darkness reading she demonstrates how the website works using the word heart (which goes back to the Old Norse hjarta) and the word darkness (Old English deorcnysse) and takes us back through the history of each word.

“So, class,” Mrs. Blackburn says when she’s done with the general history lesson about the birth of the English language. “What are some other words that you associate with Heart of Darkness, so far?”

I raise my hand, which surprises her because I’m not typically so quick to volunteer in this setting (not my cup of tea, remember), then suggest the word horror, which the website tells us comes from early fourteenth-century French.

Oh la horreur.

Mrs. Blackburn looks pleased that I have apparently already finished the book and know the significance of the word.

Thank you, Damian.

Then she sends us off on the class laptops to look up our own set of words. “Research a word that’s been on your mind,” she instructs.

I stare at the blank screen for a long time before I actually type in a word that’s on my mind.

GHOST (noun):

Origin: before 900; Middle English goost (noun), Old English gāst; cognate with German Geist spirit

1. The soul of a dead person, a disembodied spirit imagined, usually as a vague, shadowy or evanescent form, as wandering among or haunting living persons.

2. A mere shadow or semblance; a trace.

3. A remote possibility.

As in: there’s not even a ghost of a chance that what I saw—what I’ve been seeing, I guess is a more accurate description, as it’s happened two times now—is real. It seems real, in the moment. It feels real. But it is not real.

Ghosts do not exist. I am a rational person. I know this.

Which leads me to:

HALLUCINATION (noun):

Origin: 1640–50; < Latin hallūcinātiōn- (stem of (h) allūcinātiō) a wandering of the mind.

1. False or distorted perception of objects or events with a compelling sense of their reality, usually resulting from a mental disorder (????) or drug (no, pretty squeaky clean, drugs-wise; I don’t even like to take painkillers). The objects or events so perceived. (See also: delusion.)

A lapse of sanity.

A break.

This seems like a far more likely explanation.

I open my notebook and stare at the edge of the Ashley letter peeking out of the front pocket, the way the ink is slightly smeared on the letter y. Ty was a lefty; he always had this smudge on the side of his hand at the end of the school day from dragging his hand through everything he wrote.

For Ashley. Not to Ashley, but for her.

FOR (preposition):

Origin: before 900. From the Proto-Germanic fura. Old Saxon furi. Middle Dutch voor.

1. With the object or purpose of

2. Intended to belong to, or to be used in connection with

3. Suiting the purposes or needs of

4. In order to obtain, gain, or acquire

5. Used to express a wish, as of something to be experienced or obtained

For has too many meanings.

“All right, class,” Mrs. Blackburn says abruptly. “That’s enough time, I think, to ponder the significance of a word. Let’s share.”

I can’t share this. Ghost. Hallucination. For. Hello, class, I’m a crazy person.

I sit quietly panicking while Mrs. Blackburn begins to wander between the rows of desks, occasionally stopping and gathering a word from a student: baseball from Rob Milton, beautiful from Jen Petterson, book from Alice Keisig—we’re a terribly original bunch, and apparently stuck on the Bs. “What I hope that you’re coming to understand as you study etymology is that a word is not simply a word,” Mrs. Blackburn says with that teacherly touch of drama, like this is life-changing stuff she’s giving us here. She’s that kind of teacher—the type who inflates everything, calls us by our last names instead of our first so that our conversations sound more formal, stresses the importance of each book we read, each essay we write, like it’s the most important thing for us to know before we head out into the big bad world.