"Well." I hold up my hands. "n.o.body's smart like I am. Obviously."

She grins. "Right. You're MIT material."

"I'm MIT material," I agree, and it feels good, that someone else knows.

We go back to listening to our respective music for a while. Sadie's head bobs. I close my eyes and try to get lost in the Piano Concerto no. 2.

Sadie taps on my arm. I pull out my earbud.

"You were brave, giving the letter to Ashley." Her black-ringed blue eyes, so close to mine, are earnest, admiring. "That took guts."

"It took forever before I actually did something about it," I say.

"True, but you did something."

True.

"And now Ty can move on," she says, lowering her voice when she says his name so people don't hear. "He can be at peace now."

I don't know whether or not to believe her. But, for once, I hope she's right.

"Yeah," I say. "Maybe now things will start to get back to normal."

When we get to school, it's immediately apparent that something's wrong. It's too quiet. Students are standing in groups, whispering, the boys with their heads down, the girls looking tearful. Even the teachers are somber as they shuffle toward their cla.s.srooms.

Something has happened.

I don't like the way people are looking at me. There's a new awareness in their stares, which burns me before they turn away and go back to their hushed conversations. Something has happened that involves me in some way.

My brain goes straight to the letter for Ashley. It must have had something to do with me, and she must be telling people about it.

I knew I should have read the dumb letter. Why didn't I read the dumb letter?

I spot Damian standing by the door to the counselor's office. He's crying. He sees me, and he starts crying harder.

My heart is ice as I approach him.

"Hey," I rasp nervously. "Are you okay? What's going on?"

"Patrick Murphy is dead," he chokes out. "He was a soph.o.m.ore. He was my friend. He was-"

I know who Patrick Murphy is. One of the three amigos.

"How?" I ask, but part of me already knows the answer.

"He killed himself." He wipes a fat tear that rolls down his chin and gives me a look that's pure despair. "At the train yard, about an hour ago."

My vision goes white. I lean against the wall and wait for the color to return. When it does, I'm so angry my hands are shaking. I know it's inappropriate and completely selfish, but at that moment, I'm furious at Patrick. Not for doing something so stupid as dying. Not that. But for the way I know my mother's face is going to look when she hears the news. I'm mad at the way, just five minutes ago, I'd finally felt like I had the ground under my feet for the first time since Ty died.

And now this.

Damian goes back to crying, hard, like he doesn't care who's watching, his thin shoulders racked by sobs.

I think, if I put my hand out and touch him on the shoulder, will it make it better or worse for him?

I think, if I put my hand out and touch his shoulder, will I be able to hold it together myself?

I think, no.

"I'm sorry," I murmur. I don't know if he hears me.

Then I back away.

There are so many people crying. I walk among them like a zombie. I think, I have to keep moving. I have a big German test later. I have to keep my grades up for MIT. I have to pa.s.s with flying colors. I have to keep going.

But the ground is flying out from under me.

Something roars in my head. I hate everything, in this moment. I hate the world. I hate life.

Ty.

Now Patrick.

Another boy dead.

SOMEHOW, I'M NOT EVEN SURE EXACTLY HOW, I get through the rest of the day. I ride home. I make my way silently up the driveway and into my house. I take off my shoes and coat and set my backpack by the door. I pad down the hall into Mom's bedroom, through the room, into her bathroom. I open her bathroom cabinet and take down her bottle of prescription Valium.

If this were Brave New World, I'd take the stupid soma.

I wonder if Mom knows yet. My heart squeezes at the thought. For a minute I'm struck with a childlike desire to have her hold me and stroke my hair and tell me everything will be all right. I'm upset, and I want my mother to comfort me. That's what mothers do. But with this news about Patrick, I suspect it's going to be the other way around.

She's going to need me.

I need to keep it together.

"We must learn to deal with the facts," I whisper. I look at the single bright pill in my hand for a minute, and then I put it in my mouth and lean over the faucet to swallow it down.

I go to my room and curl up on my bed.

0.

144.

233.

377.

610.

987.

1,597.

2,584.

4,181.

6,765.

10,946.

17,711.

28,657.

46,368.

75,025.

121,393.

196,418.

317,811.

514,229.

832,040.

1,346,269.

2,178,309.

3,524,578.

5,702,887.

9,227,465.

14,930,352.

24,157,817.

39,088,169.

My head goes fuzzy. I imagine the Valium doing its work inside me, binding to the receptors in my brain. I can feel myself sliding, sliding, off to the gray s.p.a.ce. To sleep.

I don't dream about anything at all.

11 March Here's my last real memory of Patrick Murphy: the day I caught Ty and his friends smoking in the playhouse.

They were 12.

Oh, yeah. They were busted big time.

Building stuff was one of Dad's temporary hobbies when I was about 9. It started when he decided to construct a custom doghouse for our dog, Sunny. He spent about two weeks on it in careful construction, nailing and sanding and laying real roof tiles on the top to keep the weather out. He even painted it to match our house: green, with white trim.

Sunny hated it. She much preferred the family-room sofa.

It didn't matter. Dad was so pleased with how the doghouse turned out that he decided to try his hand at something bigger. A playhouse. He went to Toys "R" Us to study the pictures of the thousand-dollar playhouses they sold and came home with a solemn promise to Ty and me that he would build us the best playhouse this side of the Mississippi-not some roughshod half-plastic monstrosity that would only look good for a summer or two, he said. Something solid.

Something that would last.

He enlisted the help of Aunt Jessica, who's an architect in Missouri. She drew up the blueprints for a 500-square-foot, one-and-a-half-story playhouse, which was basically a square little room with a ladder and a loft.

Dad bought the materials. He laid a set of pretreated railroad ties as the foundation for the structure, in case we ever sold our house and wanted to move the playhouse, he said. He dug a 30-foot-long trench between the house and the far corner of the backyard, so he could run electricity to our playhouse. So we could have lights.

It was a big freaking deal.

Dad built the frame first, then the roof. He put real insulation in the walls, to keep it warm in the winter and cool in summer. Ty and I wrote our names on the inside of one wall before Dad sealed it up with drywall and painted. He installed real gla.s.s windows that opened and closed, complete with screens to keep the bugs out, and a real full-sized front door with a little window in it. Then he set down a layer of cheap black-and-white-checkered linoleum on the main floor, and green carpet in the loft. The outside he painted to match our house, too. Green with white trim. Topped off with a tiny front porch with a porch light and everything.

Mom sewed some curtains for the windows. She bought a large play kitchen set from a garage sale in Lincoln: a toy refrigerator, stove, and sink, with storage where I could keep my food play dough molds, my plastic dishes and cups, and my tea set. She even splurged on a child-sized wooden table and chairs.

Suddenly all the neighborhood kids wanted to come to our house to play.

Sadie and I practically lived in the playhouse from ages 9 to 12, our sleeping bags always ready to roll out in the loft. The green carpet became gra.s.s for our My Little Ponies and Barbie's front lawn, and the light blue walls were the sky, and we stuck glow-in-the-dark stars to the sloped ceiling.

It was our own private world.

I feel I must guiltily confess that it wasn't Ty's own private world, not until Sadie and I lost interest, which took a few years. Then, after dollies and Barbies and playing at being grown-ups lost their sparkle, the playhouse pa.s.sed to Ty.

So. That time with Patrick. Mom sent me out to the playhouse to bring Ty, Damian, and Patrick in for dinner. I knew there was something going down the minute I came through the door and heard all this scrambling up in the loft.

I smelled the cigarettes right away. I mean, they hadn't even opened the windows.

"Hey, you guys," I said cheerfully. "What are you doing?"

I climbed halfway up the ladder and stuck my head into the loft. The boys all looked at me with wide, innocent eyes.

"Nothing," Ty said. He gestured to Dad's old boom box, which was playing "Stairway to Heaven." "We're just chilling."

I looked at Damian and Patrick. Damian looked the same as he does now: thin and birdlike, his clothes hanging off him in various shades of muted colors, gray eyes wary like any second he expected somebody to attack him. Patrick was one of those kids who had orange hair like a sweet potato and white, white skin with freckles all over. His face was bright red.

"Are you okay, Patrick?" I asked.

He started coughing. The minute he opened his mouth a puff of cigarette smoke came out. He coughed and coughed and coughed.

I looked down for a minute. "Hmm," I said. Sigh. "Okay, boys. Hand them over."