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fuck?”
    I’m sweating now and the heat surges through my body, so I take off my jacket and pull myself up, saying, “Hey, did you see that?”
    Ordell laughs some more. “Yeah, dude. Duh.”
    â€œNo, man, not me.”
    I wonder, then, is this just another hallucination? An apparition created by misfiring synapses in my brain?
    But . . . it seemed so real.
    â€œWas that Eliza?”
    Ordell narrows his eyes at me. “What?”
    I swallow hard. “Was that Eliza Lindberg?”
    Ordell nods. “Yeah. You didn’t know she was back?”
    â€œN-no . . . I didn’t.”
    And then Ordell starts to laugh hard and squeezes my shoulder. “Oh, yeah, I remember. You hella liked her, right?”
    â€œNo,” I say. “No, I’m just . . . I’m surprised.”
    â€œYeah, you know her dad’s, like, some big restaurant guy.”
    â€œYeah, yeah, I know.”
    â€œSo they just moved to open up that restaurant.”
    â€œIn New Orleans.”
    â€œSee, you knew about it.”
    I grab my backpack. “Yeah, I just didn’t know they were back.”
    â€œWell, they are.” He laughs again. “We gotta go to class, man. But seriously, call me, all right?”
    He punches me in the chest so I take a step back and almost trip down the stairs again.
    â€œYeah, totally.”
    He walks off and I start down the hall past the still-life drawings hung up from the freshman art class, done in gray charcoal and pencil.
    Bodies walk past me in both directions, and the lights are flickering overhead, and everything is all smudged around me like the drawings on the wall.
    â€œJesus Christ,” I say out loud.
    Eliza Lindberg.
    I guess I knew she’d be coming back at some point. After all, this is her home. And setting up a restaurant in New Orleans couldn’t take forever.
    Two years.
    I haven’t spoken to her once since that last day—that day that I fucked it all up, that day that I asked her to be my girlfriend.
    Like I said, it was the end of eighth grade, and I guess I was just nervous that once we started high school she was going to forget about me or something. Behind the gym after school, I asked her if she would “go out with me.” She started crying and yelling at me that I’d “ruined everything,” which was true, though I didn’t know it at the time.
    It was only a few weeks later when Preston told me she was moving with her family to New Orleans to open another one of her dad’s restaurants.
    I felt sick at the thought of never seeing her again.
    But then, just a month after that, I had my first episode at the beach. And then I was grateful Eliza would never have to see me like that—delusional, crazy, strapped down to a hospital gurney. She would never have to know about what happened to me. She’d never have to know what I did to Teddy. That was the one good thing out of all this fucking bad.
    But now I wonder . . .
    Does
she know?
    The question repeats itself over and over in my mind, like one of my dad’s old records, the needle skipping.
    Does she know?
    Does she know?
    Because all I wanted was for her to never find out.
    I push past a couple freshman boys whispering in the hall, and then I turn in to the classroom. Our biology teacher, Mr. Heinz, is a small man with chiseled features—Germanic-looking. He has blond hair parted to one side and he is very tan. He’s playing a classical music CD on an old boom box splattered with white paint. Bach piano concertos.
The Well-Tempered Clavier,
Book 1 or 2. My dad has the same album on vinyl at home. The music is simple and clear and melodic.
    â€œTake a seat, Miles,” Mr. Heinz whispers. “We’re solving these Punnett squares. Please try not to disturb everyone.” He gestures to the whiteboard, where a complicated genetics problem has been written out in green marker.
    I