CHRISTMAS BREAK COMES AND GOES, but for Deena, it just stays. She gets sick on the first day of January and misses the entire first week back at school. Travis says she is faking.

When I stop by to give her her copy of Lord of the Flies for English, her grandmother answers the door, fully awake but squinty-eyed, wearing a dress with a zipper that goes from the hem at her knees to her throat. “Deena sick,” she says, shaking her head. “No play.”

But Deena comes out of her room, pale and coughing, wearing one of Travis’s sweatshirts. “I’m so sick,” she tells me. “I feel like crap.”

Her grandmother says something sharply to her in German. Deena apologizes.

“Maybe it’s mono?” I ask. If it is, she won’t be able to come to school for weeks, maybe months.

“Just the flu.” She swallows, looking pained. “Have you seen Travis?”

“Not really. In class, I mean, and on the bus. But that’s it.”

“Have you talked to him?”

“Not really.” This is a lie. Travis and I got to work as partners in geometry today, taking a timed test. We beat Traci Carmichael and Brad Browning by five minutes, and high-fived each other on the way out the door.

“Me neither,” she says, coughing again. “I’m here dying, and he doesn’t even care.”

She’s sick again the next day, and again, it’s just me and Travis on the bus. He’s the oldest person on the bus now, the only junior, and also the tallest. When he walks down the aisle, the yarny ball on top of his ski hat skids along the metal brackets of the ceiling. “Someday…,” he says, sliding in next to me. “Someday I’ll have a car. When I’m old and have money, I’m going to find some poor kid who’s in high school and still has to ride the bus and give him a car.”

“A car-lorship,” I say, making room for him.

“That’s right. A car-lorship.” He takes off his hat, his curly hair springing out from under it. He has a red scarf, a hat, and mittens, but that’s it. All winter long, he has gone without a coat. I can’t tell if it’s because he thinks coats are stupid or because he doesn’t have one.

Through the windows, we watch Adele Peterson’s red Honda Prelude pull out of the parking lot, Traci Carmichael in the passenger seat. Adele Peterson is a junior, and she lives next door to Traci and across the street from Libby in another brick house with too many windows. Adele got this car for her sixteenth birthday. I know this because Traci talked in a loud voice in geometry about how she was there when Adele first saw the car. Her father had parked it in the driveway the night before, and tied a white ribbon around it while Adele was inside sleeping like the little princess she is, her last night of being fifteen. And when she came out in the morning for school, there it was.

“She came outside,” Traci said, talking just to Brad Browning, really, but loud enough for everyone to hear, “and she was like, ‘Oh my God.’”

Adele gives rides to both Traci and Libby now, and they pass us on the bus when the road goes to four lanes on McPhee Street. They look like the Go-Go’s in a music video, the radio playing loud, the windows rolled down even when it’s cold out. Traci sits in the passenger seat every day, no matter what. Libby is taller than Traci, but she sits in the back. She has to put her feet up on the seat so her chin rests on her knees, and when they go past the bus, she looks up at us from the backseat like she is looking up out of a basement.

“You notice it’s a red car,” I say, nudging Travis, and this makes him smile. We have expanded on our joke that Traci Carmichael is actually the Devil, sent down in the form of a fifteen-year-old girl to challenge good with evil. We have taken note that she wears colored contacts now: some days her eyes are blue; some days her eyes are brown. Travis says that at night, when no one is looking, her eyes turn red, and if you look directly into them, even in the daytime, you can go blind or crazy. This, Travis says, is how she won student president.

“You know Deena wants a pair of colored contacts?” he asks me, pointing at his own eyes. “She wanted blue ones for Christmas.” He shivers, making a face. “They creep me out. Your eyes should be the color of your eyes.”

I nod in agreement, although if I could make my eyes look different, not so sleepy-looking, I probably would. “Have you talked to her?” I ask. “She’s really sick.”

“Yeah, she’s real sick. She was healthy all through break, you notice.”

I think of Deena, wrapped in her quilt and coughing. I know she really is sick this time, but I don’t say this to Travis. She has faked being sick other times, and this is really the point. “She says you haven’t gone to see her.”

“Not true. I went over there three days ago. If she even is sick, she’s probably contagious, right? I’ll get whatever she’s got.” He rolls his eyes. “I’ll catch laziness.”

I say nothing. He picks at the green covering of the back of the seat in front of us. “She has to understand that I can’t just sit around with her all the time.” He puts one of his mittened hands over his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Are you guys in a fight?”

“No. No. But you know I’ve been talking to Goldman. I’ve been thinking about stuff, stuff I want to do.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.” He reaches over me and slides open the window. “I want to go to fucking Australia.”

“I hear it’s a wonderful town,” I say.

He smiles again, the second time on just this bus ride, because of something I’ve said. “I don’t know,” he says. “It’s just weird. I just keep thinking that this is always how it is. People try to drag you down.”

I nod, waiting for him to say it. But he doesn’t.

“You think Deena’s dragging you down?” I ask.

He waits. “No. Maybe.” He glances at me again, lowering his voice. “This is going to sound weird, but, okay. I guess I keep thinking that this was how my dad felt when he left, you know? Like I’ve been so mad about it, my whole life, thinking he didn’t have to leave us just to stop drinking. But I don’t know. Maybe he did.”

I think back to Mr. Rowley, when he used to fall asleep on our doorstep, setting his own clothes on fire. “You didn’t make him drink, Travis. You were just a little kid.”

He nods, still picking at the seat cover. “I know. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Deena’s not a bad person, but it’s like, I don’t know. I want to get through school, maybe even go to college or something. But she’s mad because that’s not what I promised her six months ago. And now I can’t get it back. It’s like she’s locked that into her brain.” He has succeeded in pulling off an entire section of the seat in front of him.

I have to work to keep my face the same. “You might break up with her?”

“I’m just talking. Don’t say anything to her, okay? But whatever happens, it’s over when I graduate.” He looks up at me, and he doesn’t look away until I am embarrassed.

“Anyway, I miss getting to hang out with just you.”

Oh.

And now, coming from the inside of my own head, there is a small, electric hum, steady and pleasant, and I think about the terrible night in the McDonald’s, the night Travis met Deena and they wouldn’t stop looking at each other, the force field between them lighting up their eyes.

Perhaps this is how it feels to be inside of it.

Deena lies on my bed, Lord of the Flies open and resting on top of her face. She is only on page fifty-four, and the test is tomorrow. “I hate this book,” she says, her voice muffled under the pages. “I hate it so much.”

“It’s good,” I tell her. “And it’s fast, too. If you start reading now, you can finish.”

She shakes her head under the book. “There aren’t even any girls in it. And there’s no way I can finish it by tomorrow.”

I know in Deena language, this means she wants me to tell her what happens in the book so she can write her essay tomorrow. I am tired of doing this for her. I have done this for her with Billy Budd, Of Mice and Men, and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” I am considering making something up this time, telling her that the book is about the boys on the island learning to be nice to one another, starting their own business selling seashells to people who stop by on their boats. But I look at her lying there underneath the book, her thin arms flailed out to her sides, and I know I won’t really do this.

Lately, I have been feeling sorry for Deena. Her eyes are still large, but instead of thinking of them as just beautiful, now I think of them as looking a little bewildered. Her irises are such a deep, dark brown that it is difficult to tell where the pupils in the center end, and so this makes her look as if her eyes are dilated all the time, like she is one of the cats, trying to see in the dark.

She takes the book off her face and sets it down on the floor. “Do you know why Travis is being such an ass lately?” She pouts, scooting the book farther away with her foot. “He’s always in a bad mood. He’s always busy.”

I say no without looking up from my book, trying to make the moment of my answer pass quickly. I’m not doing anything to her. It’s just that things are starting to shift. Travis tapped on my window last night, and I am still sleepy because we stayed up so late, sitting on the roof in our hats and mittens, the knee of his jeans grazing against the knee of my leggings, maybe accidentally, maybe not. Which one is that one? Polaris. Which one is that one? He did not mention Deena once.

She yawns, tracing her finger along the edges of one of my calendar posters, a blue-and-gold picture of the pyramids in Egypt against a cloudless sky. “He wouldn’t even help me with my homework tonight,” she says.

“You don’t need Travis to help you read a book, Deena.”

“Actually, I don’t need to read that stupid book. That’s what I don’t need.”

“You’ll need it to graduate.”

She looks out my window, frowning. It is almost spring, but a winter storm moved in last week, covering the ground with a watery snow that has already frozen into hard clumps, caked with dirt from passing cars. The landscape of Treeline Colonies has not improved much, and in the winter, I get depressed just looking outside, at the leafless hedges planted by the doors, the frozen drainage ditch by the highway.

“You know we’re going to move far away from here when we get married,” she says. “Somewhere warm. By the ocean. Maybe Florida, or California. We’re not even going to tell my grandmother or anyone else where we’re going. But I’ll tell you. You can come visit us.” She rolls over and leans her head off my bed, her face upside down, her dark hair hanging to the floor in a way that makes me think of the tiny trolls attached to key chains for sale in the Kwikshop. She closes her eyes and smiles. “No more snow and no more cold.”

She reaches over to pick at a strand of my hair, and I know she is doing this to check for split ends, the damage done to my hair from the terrible perm she tried to give me, which is only now starting to relax. I pull my head away. “Deena, you might want to double-check those plans with him again.”

She rolls back up on her stomach, and I watch the color drain out of her face, down her neck, her hoop earrings falling back into place. “Why? Did he say something to you?”

“I just…I’m not supposed to say anything. I just think he’s been thinking.”

Her eyes stay on mine. “Evelyn? What did he say?”

I hesitate. I am not supposed to tell, but I feel bad for her. She shouldn’t be whiling away her days dreaming about the life she and Travis are going to have by an ocean somewhere when he is thinking about college and Australia. I’m doing her a favor, although looking at her now, I can see she doesn’t think I am.

“I just think he’s going to keep his options open,” I say.

“When did you talk to him?”

“A few days ago. Don’t tell him I told you, or he won’t ever tell me anything again.”

She is still looking at me, eyes narrowed. I find it hard to look back. I have watched my mother long enough to know that there are all kinds of ways of being smart. Just because Deena reads slowly doesn’t mean she can’t see the little part of me that is happy about what I am telling her now.

“I’m only telling you this so you don’t get too carried away, Deena.”

But she’s looking over my head now, out the window, past the ice-covered parking lot to Travis’s dark window, though his shade is pulled all the way down.

My grandfather will turn sixty this February, and Eileen wants us to come to the party. There will be balloons and cake, she says. It won’t last long. And it will mean so much, she adds, to him.

My mother’s right eyebrow goes up. “Did he say that?”

Eileen nods, avoiding my mother’s eyes. For her New Year’s resolution, she is trying to quit smoking, and already she has bitten off all the white of her fingernails. “He said he’d be glad to have you, Tina. You and Evelyn and little Sam.”

My mother frowns, looking down at Samuel. Now that he has learned to use a spoon, she is upping the ante: he has to answer her questions. She has attached a tray to his wheelchair, with a green circle taped to one side that reads YES and a red square on the other side that reads NO.

“Sam, we’re going to have some ice cream,” she says, speaking directly into his ear. “Would you like a bowl?” She takes his finger and points it in the direction of the green circle. “Yes?” she asks. She takes his finger and points it in the direction of the red square. “Or no?”

We wait, watching his hand slowly slide across his tray to the YES, like an oracle on a Ouija board. When his finger touches YES, Eileen claps. My mother scoops out two bowls of ice cream—one chocolate, one vanilla. “I have to offer him choices,” she tells Eileen. “All the books I’m reading say that this is what’s really important.”

Verranna Hinckle has been giving my mother books to read: The Special Child, Communicating with Your Child, A Doctor’s Take on the Non-Verbal Child. Each time she finishes one, Verranna Hinckle brings her another.

We wait again, watching Samuel’s hand move slowly in the direction of the chocolate ice cream.

“Thank you for telling me you want chocolate, not vanilla,” my mother says, the words loud and slow, like someone is standing behind us, holding a cue card for her to read. She slides the bowl of chocolate toward him and clasps his hand around his spoon. Eileen says I should have the bowl of vanilla. But I don’t want it, and neither does my mother, so Eileen takes it for herself.

“Honestly, Tina,” she says, waving her spoon at my mother. “You’re doing such an amazing job with him. Really.”

“Thanks, Mom. I’m trying hard.” I see the ends of my mother’s mouth twitch, almost a smile. She is hearing things like this more and more. Last week, Verranna Hinckle brought two other women from the university over with her, and they watched Samuel feed himself and point at what he wanted. They used the same word—“amazing”—as if he and my mother had performed a magic trick, pulled a rabbit out of an empty hat. I don’t think my mother knows what to do with these compliments when she gets them, especially from Eileen. She’s like a person without any hands getting flowers.

“So you think you might come?” Eileen asks. “To the party?”

My mother sits down in the chair next to Samuel. “No. I’m sorry, Mom. But no.”

Eileen takes a small swallow of ice cream and sets the bowl back on the table. “It’s his birthday, Tina. Just a couple of hours. It wouldn’t kill you.”

“It might,” my mother says. She reaches over and dabs a napkin at Samuel’s mouth. “I wish you’d leave this alone. If he wants to come out here and try to talk to me, he can. He knows how to get here, and he’s a grown man.”

“But maybe it’s difficult for him to tell you how he feels, Tina!”

My mother laughs. “Actually, Mom, I think he’s always been pretty good at that.”

Eileen leans back in her chair, her arms crossed in front of her. She is finally starting to look older, like a real grandmother, the lines around her mouth growing deeper. My mother says it’s from the cigarettes. “You know, Tina, you are a real puzzle to me. I find it hard to believe that you can be so kind to your little boy and have absolutely no compassion whatsoever for your own father.” She points her spoon at my mother again. “He’s going to be sixty, you know. His heart is bad.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” my mother says. “Look, I’ll tell you how it is. I just can’t. Not with Samuel. Okay? I know how he’ll look at him.” She shakes her head, wincing as if she can actually see all of this in front of her, like a movie projected on the wall behind Eileen’s head.

Eileen sighs, reaching over and pulling her fingers through Samuel’s hair. “What about when he dies, Tina? How are you going to feel about you being so petty—”

“I’m not being petty. If he wants to call me and talk to me about it, he can. But it’s a little hard to make peace with someone who doesn’t actually think of you as a person. And you can’t forgive someone who isn’t even sorry in the first place.” She shrugs, looking back at Eileen. “If he dies, he dies. I’ll be okay.”

Eileen makes a face like the kind you might make if you accidentally drank soured milk, or found a dead mouse behind the refrigerator. “That’s a terrible thing to say, Tina. A terrible thing.”

“It’s the truth.”

“No. You’ll look back and you’ll be full of regret. And it’ll be too late.”

I try to imagine the scene in Eileen’s head, what she’s imagining—my mother, dressed in black, reaching for her father’s casket as they lower it into the ground, pounding her fists against the metal, crying, I’m so sorry. You were right. I’m not a person. I was a horse all along.

“You will, Tina,” Eileen says, reaching into her back pocket for the cigarettes that are no longer there. “You’ll feel awful. But when death comes, it comes. And then it’ll be too late.”

My mother pulls Samuel out of his chair and onto her lap, pecking him lightly on the top of his head. “Well,” she says, carefully. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

Traci Carmichael is dead.

I am sitting in Mrs. Geldof’s bright room, looking at Mrs. Geldof’s watery eyes and the map of the world on the bulletin board behind her, the United States in the middle, Kansas in the middle of that. Traci’s desk is empty, and so is Libby’s.

There has been a car accident, Mrs. Geldof says. Yesterday, on the way home from school. Adele Peterson was driving, and she’s dead too. They were going too fast, not wearing seat belts. Libby is alive, but badly hurt.

“What?” Ray Watley asks. There is a ripple in his voice, and although I think it’s just because he doesn’t believe what Mrs. Geldof is saying, it comes out as a laugh. “Are you kidding?”

“No,” Mrs. Geldof says. She blinks, and there are tears. “No, honey, I’m not kidding.”

I can feel my arms turning cold, someone running a feather lightly across my skin. I saw them yesterday, all three of them. Adele honked twice when they pulled up alongside the bus in the next lane. Traci’s arm was hanging out the window, fingers snapping to the radio, three pink plastic bracelets around her wrist.

But I remember now. There were sirens only a few minutes later. Travis and I were still on the bus, laughing about something. Not about Traci. Something else. When we got to the street where the accident was, there was already a detour set up. We had to take another route, and it took longer. We got home late.

“They’re dead?” Ray Watley asks again. Mrs. Geldof nods.

No one says anything. The truth of it, what this really means, starts to settle in slowly, moving into us through our open mouths, seeping in through our eyes when we look at the empty desks.

Ray Watley is quiet, not laughing now, his hands still on his desk in front of him. Deena turns around to look at me. She is already crying. Other girls are crying too, and I understand that I should be crying, that this is the appropriate response. But I am still just sitting and blinking, doing nothing, like a cartoon character hit on the head with something large. Even when people start to get up and move toward one another, clasping hands, I just sit there, still and dumb.

Mrs. Geldof comes over to me and pushes her wet cheek against mine, her arms tight around my rigid back.

“I know, honey,” she says, still crying. “I know.”

There is a picture of Adele’s crumpled Honda in the newspaper. The front end is completely smashed in, the windows shattered. My mother moves around me quietly, making lunch for Sam. We’ve been given the rest of the week off from school.

“Evelyn, sweetie, don’t look at that anymore,” she says. “Put it away.” She tugs on a corner of the paper, but I hold tight. According to the article, Adele was making a left turn after the light had already turned red, and the Honda slammed into an oncoming car, head-on. Traci actually survived the wreck, and was airlifted by helicopter to a hospital in Kansas City. Adele died on impact. The driver of the other car broke her foot in two places, but that was all. Libby Masterson was, of course, in the backseat, and is still in the hospital, in stable condition.

Libby had not been wearing a seat belt either, and Mrs. Geldof told us that the only reason she was alive was physics, a question of who was sitting where. The rest of us should not count on such luck and should wear our seat belts. Libby, Mrs. Geldof said, again and again, was very lucky.

“Yeah right,” my mother says. “Tell that to the shrink she’s going to need.”

On Monday, we are supposed to go back to school, but I don’t want to. I tell my mother I’m not feeling well. She holds her hand against my forehead only for a moment, biting her bottom lip.

“Evelyn, I can see you’re upset.”

I roll my eyes. “I’m just sick. I wasn’t friends with any of them.”

“I know. I know. But still, honey. I can see you’re upset.”

I go back to my room and lie down, and she brings me a 7-UP, plugs her tape player in next to my bed. But I don’t play it. I know I am not really sick, but it is all I can do to just lie here and look up at the star chart on my ceiling with no sound around me at all.

I am trying to figure out whether or not I’m a bad person. There are some points that argue that I’m not: One, I did not make Traci and Adele die. They were in a car, going too fast, and I was on the bus. Two, just because Traci is dead now does not mean that she was a nice person before she died. Just because she is dead now does not mean she was never phony. All it means now is that she’s dead.

I stare up at the star chart. I cannot go to sleep.

In driver’s ed last year, Mr. Leubbe rigged up what he called a Seat Belt Convincer to the back of his truck. He made us all try it, one at a time, buckling each of us into an old car seat that slid quickly down a two-foot ramp. I had been amazed by how much it hurt, the strap holding me back as the rest of my body went forward. I had a red welt across my neck that stayed there for two days.

“You kids think you’re immortal,” Mr. Leubbe had told us. “You think you’re going to be able to put out your hands and save yourself,” he said. “But it happens too fast. That was only eight miles an hour. Try it at fifty, and your arms will break like twigs!” He had clapped his hands together, loud and sudden. “Your teeth will hit the pavement before you can think to shut your mouth. You’ll bite off your own tongue!”

It is difficult to imagine Traci Carmichael like this, her blue-gray eyes hurled into the pavement and ended, just like that.

I lie there, still and silent for hours, until I hear my mother tell me good night, wheeling Samuel into their room. Only when the light in the hallway goes out do I get up and move across my room to my dresser. The clothes are still there, in the bottom drawer, underneath my own sweaters and shirts. The white jeans are still smooth and new-looking, creased where I folded them years ago, but the palm trees ironed onto the sweatshirt are cracked, starting to peel. And I am amazed by how small everything looks. The red shoes are so tiny, just half the size of my foot now.

I reach into the pocket of the jeans, and feel it there, the locket, a heart-shaped coldness between my finger and thumb, still hanging on its golden chain.