I’m not doing well, here. Clearly.

When the hole fills in again, my body feels achy, like I’m coming down with something. I flush the toilet as if I was in there for a good reason. I go out, take my glasses off, and splash some water on my face. The girls on either side of me don’t say anything; they just return to meticulously washing their hands.

I lean forward to take a long look at myself in the mirror. There are dark circles under my eyes, and my lips are chapped and colorless. I swipe at a wet tendril of hair that’s clinging to my forehead, but then it just sticks to a different spot. The whites of my eyes look like road maps, veiny and red-rimmed and swollen, like I’ve been crying, even though I haven’t been crying.

I look wrecked.

This whole thing has warped me, I think. I’m a board left out in the rain, and it’s impossible to go back to being straight and undamaged ever again. This is who I am now.

The girl whose brother died.

Plus there’s the fun fact that I am losing my mind. I’m here at school freaking out about a stupid letter that my dead brother wrote for his ex—why exactly?

Because some part of me thinks that Ty’s still around. Because I think maybe that drawer being open that night and that letter being in that drawer means that he wants me to deliver it. Because, no matter how much I try to be rational, some part of me wants to believe that I am seeing his freaking ghost.

This, for some reason, makes me laugh. The sound is sharp and bounces off the tight white-tiled walls of the bathroom.

Hilarious.

One of the girls next to me gets the heck out of there—she just bolts for the door. But the other girl waits for me to pull myself together. She hands me a paper towel to dry my face. And when I put my glasses back on, I realize it’s Ashley Davenport.

Awesome.

“Hi,” she says. “I saw you come in here, and I wanted to talk to you, so . . .”

So she witnessed my little breakdown. Even more awesome.

She’s wearing a bright pink cardigan over a white sequined tank top, silvery lip gloss gleaming off her Cupid’s-bow lips, and a gold heart-shaped necklace that’s resting in the hollow of her throat. She’s beautiful. What sticks out to me most about her is that she looks . . . healthy is the word that comes to mind. Not just in her athletic legs and shiny red hair and bright eyes and dewy porcelain skin. It’s more than that. She has all the signs of a person who life has left almost completely undamaged. I bet her parents are still together and still hold hands and still kiss. I bet she volunteers for some kind of charity. I bet the most tears she’s ever shed in her whole life were over her childhood dog when it died of old age.

She’s not an a-hole, I think. She’s a nice girl.

But that doesn’t change how I feel.

“There’s nothing I want to talk about,” I say. “Not with you.”

She puts her hand on my arm. Gently, but insistently. “Wait. I know you saw me and Grayson in the cafeteria yesterday. You looked upset, so I thought, you might have thought . . .”

“I might have thought what?” I challenge. “That you cheated on my brother?”

Her eyes widen. “But I didn’t cheat on Ty. I would never. He broke up with me, not the other way around. I would never have cheated on Ty. I—”

“But what about the fight? When Ty punched Grayson? Why would he do that?”

She bows her head. “I was . . . sad after Ty broke it off. He didn’t even tell me why. He just came up to me that morning and said things weren’t working out between us. He said he was sorry, and then he walked off. I was shocked. I thought we were—I cried. I was upset. People thought he was being a jerk. And the next day Grayson said something rude to Ty about it, and . . .”

“Ty hit him,” I fill in.

She squeezes my arm. “I wasn’t into Grayson back then. We just started dating like a week ago. I swear.”

I don’t know what to say.

Her lip starts trembling. A tear shines on the edge of her eye.

I wish I could cry so easily.

“Your brother was an amazing guy,” she continues. “Everybody liked him. They were only mad at him because of me, but they would have gotten over it. . . . I don’t know why he would . . .” She pauses, of course she does, but then she looks at me like I’m going to tell her now, why Ty did it, why someone like my brother, who everybody liked, who was cute and funny and popular, thought his existence was so terrible that he chose to end it.

Because I’m his sister. I should know the reasons why.

“I should have realized that he was . . . I didn’t know . . .” She lets go of my arm and presses her lips together, like she’s about to start really crying. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Lex.”

“I have to go.” I back away from Ashley, then push out of the bathroom and into the noisy, crowded hall. I walk on autopilot back to my locker. I lean against it, watching everybody pass by, ready to head toward class, ready to start their days.

I lean my head back until it touches the cool metal of the locker, and close my eyes.

She didn’t dump him. She didn’t cheat on him.

It’s not her fault.

She doesn’t even know why he broke up with her. Which makes Ty the a-hole in this scenario.

My eyes snap open. I unzip my backpack, pull out my five-subject notebook, and retrieve the letter. I don’t give myself any time to think about what I’m doing. I don’t make a plan.