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the cameras showed bomb-sniffing dogs and everything, not finding any bombs. The sheriff made a statement and Mrs. Richardson the principal made a statement and Noah’s mother made a really furious statement about the sheriff and Mrs. Richardson. I called Lily and she said her parents had been freaked, too, which really isn’t like them. They’re pretty laid back.
    “There’s been so much of this stuff,” Lily said. “People going crazy and blowing strangers away. So everybody overreacts. That’s what Dad said, once he found out it was just Noah Michalski mouthing off.”
    “But how do you know when it’s just Noah, and when somebody just like Noah has gone nuts?” I asked. That’s the part that secretly worries me. How can you tell ?
    We analyzed it all some more, and then Jesse Francis of all people called me right after we’d hung up.
    “You okay?” he asked.
    “Yeah. How about you?”
    “Yeah.” I couldn’t tell if he meant that. But it was extremely cool to have a senior call me and check up on me.
    I called Mom, too, but I didn’t hound her about Ben yet because I knew she was still mad.
    “How was everything at school?” I asked her.
    “Madhouse,” she said. “Parents having hysterics in the halls. I could wring Noah’s neck.”
    “It wasn’t all his fault,” I said, to be fair.
    “I know Noah,” Mom said. “I used to know somebody just like him.”
    “Who?”
    “Long time ago,” she said, in a tone that told me not to ask, and hung up in a hurry.
    Hmmmmm.
    Noah got suspended, but not actually arrested because he didn’t actually do anything. Mrs. Richardson called an assembly to tell us all that this was an excellent example of what happens when you make poor choices, as if life is a multiple choice test and one of the options is Make a bomb threat in the cafeteria .
    I thought about talking to Felix about how Jesse hit the floor like that, but figured it might encourage him if he’s still seeing Mom. But the upshot of the whole thing is that no one paid much attention to Jesse Francis for a while. Now that it’s all settled down again, he’s just somebody you pass in the hall, not the Freak of the Week. Lily and I eat lunch with him every day. We’ve bonded into a cafeteria trio. I think he likes it that we treat him as if he’s still a high school student and don’t ask him stupid questions like did he kill anyone. All the kids he went to school with his last year here are in college now, or have gotten married and have babies and jobs. They don’t cross paths much with people who’re still at Ayala High carrying eggs around in their pockets.
    They did made Jesse take Family Living; he showed me his egg. Sometimes you have to wonder who decides this stuff.
    “I was thinking maybe I’d get a hollow one,” he told us at lunch. “I think my mom has some plastic ones left over from my brother and sister’s baskets last Easter. I could get one of those little corn snakes they sell in pet stores and put it in there, and let it hatch when Ms. Vinson comes around to check them.”
    “Oh my God, that would be totally cool.” I stared at him with admiration—you have to like a mind like that. “You have totally got to do it.”
    “Nah,” he said.
    “Why not?”
    “It would have been funny when I was seventeen,” he said.
    “Um.” So now he thought I was immature. “So, when you’re nineteen, you just think stuff like that up, but you don’t actually do it?”
    “Life is calmer that way.”
    Lily said, “When my dad was in college, he put a frog in a salad bowl at a fraternity party.”
    Jesse snorted.
    “My mom yelled at him and put the frog in her purse and took it back to the river. That’s how they met.”
    “I’ve got to tell Ben,” I said. “That’s a ‘meet cute’ if I ever heard one.” Movie people are always trying to think up adorable ways to get their romantic characters together.
    “Be my guest,” Lily said. I couldn’t help thinking about