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happy,” she said, and she picked up her beer bottle and threw it at the concrete bench about ten feet away. It nicked the edge and shattered. Beer gushed into the grass.
    We both stared at the broken bottle.
    “Did you just throw a bottle?” I said.
    “I think I did,” she said.
    “That’s, like, what you do when you’re unhappy now?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well, I’m not happy either,” I said, and I tossed my half-full bottle at the bench too. It missed, thudded against the grass, and spun before settling and leaking onto the grass.
    “God, I’m gonna miss you,” she said.
    “Yeah,” I said back. “Me too. Miss you too.”
    “Is that how you talk now that you’re an East Coast prep student?”
    “Is yes,” I said.

    So I had hurt Claire Olivia by leaving. Now, as I scribbled words as fast as I could, trying to write something that was the complete truth while avoiding certain other truths, I realized something I hadn’t allowed myself to see before: I had been so focused on leaving that Ihad completely brushed her off when she wanted to talk about it. She must have felt totally abandoned. For all the grief I’d given her about how everything was always about her, at the most crucial time, it had been all about me.
    And now maybe we’d go to the same college — we’d try — but it was hardly a given that we’d get into the same places. A lump grew in my throat.
    The problem, as I was writing, was all that I had to leave out. Instead of going right into our strange but weird friendship (a guy has sleepovers with a girl, who happens to be his best friend?), I had to write less and hope that my words conveyed something.
    “Who will read?” Mr. Scarborough asked.
    A kid I hadn’t met yet, with a mouth full of braces, read. His piece was pretty good, about a time he’d been on a seesaw with his sister, and he was high in the air, and as a joke he’d jumped off, and she’d flown down and smacked her mouth against the metal bar. I could actually smell the blood and see the chipped tooth, which is one way I know something is well written.
    “Good, good,” Mr. Scarborough said. “What I’d like you to think about, Curtis, is culpability. You didn’t mean to hurt her; it was an accident, as you said. I’d like you to add to your homework a short piece like the one you wrote, but in this one I want you to reflect on a time when you purposefully hurt someone else. We can learn so much from seeing our own character flaws. I want to see that from you. Excellent work.”
    My gut churned. I knew that if he could find a flaw in that piece, mine would surely be flawed too, and I didn’t like the possibility. I hoped I wouldn’t have to read.
    “How about our new student?” Mr. Scarborough said, smiling at me. He looked down at his attendance sheet. “Rafe?”
    By sixth grade, I’d figured out that you have to get your parents to insist that your name is written as Rafe rather than Seamus Rafael on attendance sheets. Seamus Rafael isn’t the kind of name kids just let go by.
    So I read what I’d written.
    Claire Olivia was the kind of girl who could keep up with me on the slopes, even on the moguls. She laughed at all my jokes, even the unfunny ones. She coined the word craptacular . Her eyes smiled, even when she was crying. She was always beautiful, especially without makeup. When I told her I was coming to Natick, she looked up and to the left, like the answer was up there. I knew that it made her cry, but she never cried in front of me. I knew, because she always texted at night, and that night she didn’t. And the next morning she wouldn’t look me in the eye. When you hurt someone you care about, it’s like a part of you dies inside. If you can’t talk about it, the death goes unnoticed. I was never able to go there, and I’ll always regret that.
    “Wow. In-ter-est-ing,” Mr. Scarborough said, not taking his eyes off me. “Great details. Looking up and to the left — class, that’s the