I do a quick 180. I leave my tray on the table and walk stiffly past Sadie and her questioning expression, past my other friends, who are looking at me too, out of the cafeteria. I go to my locker, set the letter in its place in the five-subject notebook on the top shelf, and slam the door.

I’m angry, it turns out.

The image of my mother’s face swims up in my mind, when she took the box from Grayson after he rang our doorbell, the way she tried to smile at him, to thank him, before she brought it back to the kitchen table and opened it and started crying all over again, lifting out Ty’s gym shoes and his extra deodorant and the tiny magnetic mirror that he used to smile into every day.

A-holes. All of them. A-holes.

And Ashley was kissing Grayson. My brother’s a-hole friend. The guy, if the slightly crooked nose is any indication, who Ty punched that day when he got suspended from school.

Over Ashley. Ty punched him over Ashley.

I have to consider the possibility that Ashley Davenport, that lovely girl, inside and out, the right kind of girl, the nicest, might be the biggest a-hole of them all.

“Is there still a shredder in Dad’s office?” I ask Mom when I get home.

She frowns. “Yes. Why?”

“I got a credit card application in the mail,” I explain smoothly. “I would have just thrown it out, but then I remembered that you and Dad always shred that kind of thing.”

It’s getting marginally easier to lie to my mother.

“Oh,” Mom says. “Yes, that sounds like a good idea.”

Still in the cold anger I haven’t been able to shake from school, I head down the hall to Dad’s old office. The door to this room is usually shut, as if Mom can’t stand the sight of his absence. When he lived with us he kept the door open, so he could catch us as we walked by. “Hey there, Peanut,” he’d always say when he spotted me. And I would stand in the doorway for a few minutes “shooting the breeze with the old man,” as he called it, telling him about my day at school or whatever book I was reading or the square root of some number I’d memorized.

I don’t stop to look around as I enter the office. I go straight to the shredder. I turn it on.

I take the letter out of my bag.

I want to destroy it. I want this whole mess to be over with, Ty’s unfinished business, his presence, real or not, lingering in this house, his problem, his, not mine. I want to go to college and leave this part of my life behind. Start over. Be someone else besides the-girl-whose-brother-died. I’ve earned that, I think.

I don’t want to think about Ty anymore.

I finger an edge of the envelope that’s curling up, the glue there coming unstuck. I’ve been handling it too much and the paper is showing some wear.

It would be so easy to open it and find out everything.

I want to get his explanation. In his own words, I want him to tell me why.

I catch a whiff of my brother’s cologne.

“What? You want me to give it to her?” I say.

There’s no answer.

Then I ask him the question that’s been on my mind all this time. Even though he’s probably not even here.

“Why her? Why Ashley? Why would you write her a letter, and not write one to me? Didn’t you have anything worthwhile to say to me?”

No answer. But the silence feels like an answer.

I swallow.

I think about the text.

“I refuse to feel guilty about something you did,” I mumble, but I don’t mean it.

I do feel guilty.

Every single day.

I turn the shredder off. “I got into MIT,” I whisper to the empty room.

He would have been proud of me, if he were alive. He would have known how much it meant.

19.

FRIDAY. I’M ALREADY ON EDGE when I get to school. I haven’t burned the letter or shredded it or thrown it away yet, all things I’ve been tempted to do so I don’t have to get involved in this Ashley/Ty/Grayson affair. I have it with me, still stuck in the pages of my notebook. I can’t leave it home on the off chance that someone else—insert: Mom—will find it. I can’t let anybody else find it. In that way, it belongs to me.

I’m hungry. I walk to the vending machine in the corner and fish out a crinkled dollar. I missed breakfast (i.e., Mom didn’t get up to make it, and I didn’t have the energy to pour myself a bowl of cereal). I put the dollar in. The machine spits it out. I put it in. It spits it out.

It’s worse than the Lemon. “Come on,” I plead. “I require sustenance.”

Not that there’s anything good in the machine to eat. Dried fruit. Granola bars. Whole-grain pretzels. Organic gluten-free seaweed chips. This is Nebraska, for crying out loud, land of meat, potatoes, corn, corn, and corn as the five basic food groups.

I’m suddenly struck by a memory of Ty standing in this exact spot, banging on this exact machine until a bag of dried apricots dropped into the slot. He picked it up. Scowled.

“I don’t care what the First Lady says,” he complained, loudly enough that the people around us started nodding in agreement. “This is not a Pop-Tart. I need my junk food, man. How’s a growing boy to survive on all this healthy stuff? Am I right?”

He’s right.

My throat closes. I miss him I miss him I miss him. The hole in my chest explodes. I can’t breathe I can’t breathe. There are people waiting for the machine behind me, so I don’t have time to let the hole pass on its own. I stumble to the side and force my legs to move away, down the hall to the restroom, where I almost run to the last stall and sit down on the lid of the toilet and bend my head over my knees and gasp and gasp and think maybe this drug thing Dave suggested isn’t a bad idea after all.