He sent 1 text.

He wrote 1 note.

Then, at 7:49 p.m., just as Mom was getting ready to get off her 12-hour shift, he went into the garage.

He loaded the gun. He took the safety off.

He called 911.

He pulled the trigger.

The bullet struck him in the chest, severing his subclavian artery.

It took him 30–60 seconds to bleed out.

And then he died.

33.

IN THIS DREAM, TY AND I are rock climbing, something we never did in real life. Okay, not rock climbing for fun, I surmise from our apparent lack of ropes and harnesses.

Cliff climbing.

On an at-least-five-hundred-foot cliff.

Fun times.

We don’t talk in this dream. We focus on making our way up the rock face. It reminds me of the Cliffs of Insanity from The Princess Bride, the blue endless sky above us, the blue crashing ocean below us. Only there’s no Andre the Giant to take us up. No rope to climb. We just have to make it on our own.

About twenty feet from the top, the ledge I put my weight on crumbles from under me.

I start to fall. I open my mouth to scream, like screaming is all you can do when you’re about to plummet to your death, but before the sound leaves me Ty catches my hand. He pulls me to a safer spot.

“Thanks,” I breathe.

“You really messed up,” he says.

“I know.”

“No, with Damian. That was a disaster.”

“Yes. Yes, it was.”

“You should apologize.”

“I plan on it.”

“You should work it out beforehand,” he advises. “You’re not very good on the spot.”

“Oh, thank you, Ty. Thank you very much.”

“No problem.”

“How are we going to do this?” I ask him, craning my neck to look up the cliff.

“I don’t know. Be more careful,” he says.

The words have just left his mouth when he falls. It’s not like it was with me a few seconds ago, all slow motion where I have time to scream and he has time to grab me. He reaches up, grabs a rock. He makes a distressed sound, like whoops. Then he’s gone.

I look down just in time to see his body hit the rocks before a wave crashes over him.

34.

MONDAY MORNING.

I have a speech. An apology. A plan.

That’s the funny thing about plans.

The first thing that goes wrong is that I wanted to drive to school today, in order to get to school early, in order to have plenty of time to seek out Damian, but then the Lemon doesn’t start, and I spend so much time trying to get it to turn over that I miss the bus. I call Sadie hoping to get a ride, and—get this—she informs me primly that she took the bus herself. To save money. For her college books, she tells me.

Right.

I do finally get the Lemon started, but I don’t get to school until after the first bell rings, so there’s no time to head to room 121B with the crudely crafted paper flower I made for him yesterday, which says I’m sorry on every petal.

It’s lame. It’s pathetic. But I’m hoping it will work.

Then we have an impromptu danger drill at lunchtime, where we all have to pretend that there’s a shooter on campus and get under the tables and lock all the doors, so I don’t see Damian then, either.

But I can track him down during eighth period, I rationalize.

During sixth period, as everyone’s getting set up for gin rummy, the game of the hour, I ask Miss Mahoney if we can talk.

“Absolutely,” she says. “What’s up?”

“I wonder if there’s some extra credit I can do, to make up for my lousy midterm.”

“Of course. Or you can still retake the test, if you’d like,” Miss Mahoney says without hesitating, which is funny because there is no “of course” about it. “Will Friday work for you? Lunch hour?”

“Friday will work.”

“Excellent. Friday it is.”

I turn to head back to the card table, but she stops me. “Can I ask why you changed your mind?” she asks. “I mean, your original grade isn’t great, but it’s not that important in the grand scheme of things. You don’t have anything to prove to me, Lex. I know you know your stuff. So you don’t have to—”

“I got into MIT,” I say.

The whole room goes quiet. Miss Mahoney’s mouth falls open.

“As in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As in the best mathematics program in the country,” she says. “That MIT.”

“Yes. That MIT.”

“Lex, that’s amazing!” she says when she’s recovered enough to speak, and what’s great is that I know she means it. Her face has gone pink, she’s so pleased for me. “That’s wonderful!”

“There’s a part of the acceptance letter that warns that their offer is contingent on me passing the rest of the school year with flying colors,” I say.

“I see. That makes sense.”

“So I intend to give them flying colors.”

She looks like she’s about to start dancing. “I have no doubt that you will, Lex. Wow. MIT. Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” I allow myself to smile about it then, for the first time. I let myself feel it.

Back at the card table my friends are all staring at me with a quiet awe.

“Very impressive,” Eleanor says as I take a seat next to her. “You deserve it.”

This is big coming from her, because I know she applied to MIT herself, and this must mean she didn’t get in or hasn’t heard yet.