“I wanted to talk to you about this.”

She pushes a piece of paper across her desk toward me.

Last week’s midterm.

Worth 25 percent of my total grade.

Upon which, next to my name, is scrawled a big red 71%.

I push my glasses up on my nose and scan the innocuous piece of paper, aghast. Apparently I got the answers to three whole problems outright wrong, and she gave me only partial credit on a fourth problem. Out of ten.

71 percent.

Practically a D.

I swallow. I don’t know what to say.

“I know this stuff,” I say hoarsely after a few excruciating seconds, looking it over yet again, seeing my own glaring errors so plainly it feels like some kind of cruel practical joke.

There goes my 4.0, I think. Boom.

“I’m sorry,” Miss Mahoney says quietly, as if everybody in the room isn’t already straining to hear this conversation. “I can let you retake it on Friday, if you think that would help.”

It takes me a few seconds to understand. What she is sorry for. Why she’s offering me a do-over when she never gives do-overs. Your grade is a fact, she always says. You must learn to deal with the facts.

I straighten.

“No. I’ll take it.” I grab the edge of the paper and pull it toward me, pick it up, fold it in half to hide the grade. “I’ll do better on the final.”

She nods. “I’m so sorry, Lex,” she says again.

My chin lifts. “For what?” I ask, like I don’t know. “You didn’t bomb the test. I did.”

“I know things have been hard since Tyler . . .”

And she pauses.

God, I hate that pause, while the person speaking searches for the most watered-down way to say died, like calling it by another name is going to make it any less awful: terms like laid to rest, like death’s some kind of nap; passed or departed, like it’s a vacation; expired, which is supposed to be more technical but really sounds like the deceased is a carton of milk, a date stamped on them, after which they become—well, sour milk.

“Killed himself,” I fill in for Miss Mahoney.

At least I’m determined to be straight about it. My brother killed himself. In our garage. With a hunting rifle. This makes it sound like the most morbid game of Clue ever, but there it is.

The facts.

We must learn to deal with the facts.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. Then, again: “I’ll do better on the final.”

She stares up at me, her eyes full of that terrible pity.

“Is there anything else?” I ask.

“No, that’s—that’s all, Alexis,” she says. “Thank you.”

I go back to the poker table. I can feel the stares of the other students on me, my friends, my classmates, most of whom I’ve known since at least sixth grade and have done Math Club or the Science Olympiad Team or Physics Bowl with over the past four years. All now thinking I must be so cold and clinical, to say it like that. Like I don’t care. Like I clearly didn’t love my brother if I can just rattle off the fact that he’s dead so easily.

I sit down, slip the offending test into my backpack, and try to face my friends. Which is turning out to be kind of impossible.

Jill’s eyes are shining with tears. I can’t look at her, or I know she’ll start full-out sobbing. Which could set off every girl in the room, except possibly El. Because hysterical girly crying, unlike suicide, is definitely contagious.

I could go, I think. I could simply walk out, down the hall, out of the school, into the frigid 21-degree afternoon and a twelve-mile walk home. Freezing to death might be preferable to this. Miss Mahoney would let me go. I wouldn’t get in trouble.

But it’s because I wouldn’t get in trouble that I can’t leave.

I can’t have special treatment, not for this.

So I pick up my cards and try and totally fail to smile and say, as casually as I can manage, “Now, let’s see, where were we?”

Ah, yes. Three aces.

“Lex . . . ,” says El. “What grade did you—”

I point at Steven. “I believe you were going to call.”

He shakes his head. “I fold.” This time what’s written all over his face is that he has more that he wants to say. A lot more. But he doesn’t know if that’s his job anymore, to try to comfort me. He doesn’t know how to comfort me. So he folds.

I glance at El. She doesn’t meet my eyes, but shrugs one shoulder and stares at her fingernails like she’s bored. “I had the crap hand, remember?”

“Beaker?” I prompt.

Jill nods and takes a shaky breath and pushes most of her remaining Skittles to the center of the table. “I’m in,” she says.

She has nothing. A pair of queens.

I put my cards down, aces up. So hooray, I win all the candy. But it feels like I’ve lost something so much more important.

3.

IT’S LATER THAT NIGHT WHEN IT HAPPENS.

It’s a typical night, post-Ty. I’m in the downstairs den in my pj’s, lounging in Dad’s abandoned recliner. Mom is upstairs on the living room sofa, still wearing her work scrubs, reading When Bad Things Happen to Good People. She’s highlighting every few lines, the way she does with these kinds of books that people keep giving us, like every single thing the author says is aimed directly at her. But at least she’s not crying. She’s not going on about ghosts. She’s functional.

So I’ve left her studying and have spent the better part of the past few hours crunching slightly burned microwaved kettle corn and fast-forwarding through commercials on the DVR, watching Bones. I plan to watch reruns of season two until I get too tired to follow the plot, thus too tired to run through today’s little calculus debacle over and over in my head.