There.

Uh, what? Fam is holding my hand. Kinda.

It's like someone's shoved a steel rod down through my spine; suddenly I can't bend my neck or my back at all. I'm sitting upright like I'm in a posture cla.s.s from h.e.l.l.

"I want to help you, Kross," she says.

"I don't need help from a freshman."

She jerks her hand away. When I look over at her, her face has become a map of hurt.

"I'm not an idiot, Kross. I can help."

I don't say anything. She still wants to help me? After what I just said?

"I have the Internet at home. I know you don't. I can look things up for you. You know. If you need me to."

So now I feel like the worst person in the world. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I'm just all..." All what? I don't even know. I don't know why I'm doing any of this.

I tell Fam that, saying it before I've even really decided to. It feels good to say it out loud.

"Maybe because it helps you?" she says. "Or takes your mind off of something else?"

And d.a.m.n-she's right. For the most part, when I'm thinking about the ribbons and the flag and free speech, I'm not thinking about Leah and the d.a.m.n videotape and the horrible truth.

She strokes my shoulder for a moment. "It'll be OK, Kevin." It's the first time she's ever used my real name as opposed to my Fool name. It sounds strange coming from her lips.

"Why are you even here?"

"I like you, Kevin." Kevin again.

"But ... you're dating Flip."

Her face freezes except for her eyelids, which blink rapidly. Then, without warning, she barks out a loud, high laugh.

"Not like that, Kross! As a friend. A good friend. You were always the one who was nice to me. G.o.d, why do you have to be one of those guys?"

"What guys?"

"One of those guys who worship women."

I can't help laughing. "Yeah, as if."

She rolls her eyes. "Oh, puh-lease. I've seen you around girls. It's like you're way down here"-she holds a hand as far down as she can go-"and we're way up here." She stretches so that her other hand is up over her head. She looks like she should be saying, No, I swear to G.o.d, that fish was this big!

"I don't..." But I can't finish it because ... Is that real? Is that me?

"It's like ... It's like..." She stops stretching out and returns to normal and fumbles for words for a second like Dad. "It's like girls aren't real people."

"Hey! That's not fair. I know girls are-"

"They're more than real people," she says. "That's why we're way up high. It's like a girl is a treasure to you. Something to win or conquer. Or something so high up you can never get it. Untouchable. So it's like they might as well be nothing if you can never have one."

She folds her arms across her chest and nods triumphantly, which is a neat trick. I wish I knew how to nod triumphantly.

I don't want to answer her. Because, really, there's a grand total of two women in my life: Mom and Leah. One of them is three thousand miles away and untouchable and might as well be nothing. The other is right here and still untouchable and I want her to be like a treasure I could win or conquer, but in the end, she might as well be nothing, too.

Wow.

"You're, uh, you're pretty smart, Fam."

"For a freshman?"

"No. Period."

She grins at me. There's this part of me that wishes her smile made her beautiful, but it doesn't. And then I wonder if that matters at all. I think of my own smile, the one I hate.

"-treated me differently," she's saying.

"What?"

She rolls her eyes. "Come on. I'm not stupid. I know how everyone else reacted when Joey brought me into the Council." It takes me half a second to remember: Joey=Flip.

"Jedi was really p.i.s.sed," she remembers. "Speedo never once looked in my eyes when he was talking to me-he was always looking at my b.o.o.bs."

What b.o.o.bs? I think. Which is mean, but true.

"t.i.t would hardly talk to me at all. But you were nice, Kross. Even nicer than Joey, if you want to know the truth. And when you saved Leah, I knew you were a good guy." She smiles at me, and it's really not a bad smile, but it just makes me feel worse.

"Fam, what if I told you..." I stop. No. No way.

"Told me what?"

What if I told you the truth? That I'm no hero. That on that day, I...

"Nothing." I can't do it. I change the subject: "If Flip isn't nice to you, why do you stay with him?"

"Oh, he's not so bad. All boys are jerks in high school."

"Not me."

"Oh, yeah? What about what you just said a minute ago?"

"Right. Sorry."

She leans in and for a second I'm afraid she's going to kiss me. And then she does kiss me, but it's just a light little brushing of her lips on my pockmarked cheek.

"Stay strong, Kevin. You're a good guy, and you're doing the right thing."

She scampers down the ladder and disappears.

I wish I could be sure she was right.

SELF-LOATHING #3.

No one understands. But how can they understand? They don't live my life. They don't think my thoughts. My d.a.m.n thoughts.

If I could somehow purge my brain, just flush it out ... That would fix everything. I need something like that stuff you use when the shower is clogged and the water won't go down, only for my brain. I need to flush out Leah and then I need to flush out Mom and Jesse because Leah is what I used to flush out Mom and Jesse in the first place, right?

I feel terrible about it all. I can't help it-being Catholic means you feel bad about pretty much everything all the time.

Here's how we deal with guilt in my family: We pretend the thing we feel guilty about doesn't exist anymore. So Dad has no pictures of Mom anywhere in the house. I have one in my wallet, but that's it. And there's one picture of Jesse on the coffee table, but Dad never looks at it.

I try not to look at it either. I don't call Jesse a lot. We email or IM sometimes when I'm at school or the library, but that's it.

It's just that ... I mean, I was his hero. I was his big brother, his defender. I took care of him when Mom and Dad were too busy fighting to do it.

And then I let him down.

I messed everything up. That's my life, really-one long string of messing things up. Even saving Leah. Even that was messed up. I didn't even do that right.

These days, I have to struggle to figure out exactly how bad a person I am. Because there's the secret I keep, the secret about that day with Leah and the Surgeon. And that's pretty bad. I mean, that one alone is sending me to h.e.l.l.

But then there's what I did to Jesse.

Poor kid. He was only seven. He worshiped me. I was his hero.

I don't think he really got it. He knew that he'd packed up all of his stuff and that big burly guys had come and put it on a truck. Mom had showed him the map on the computer and how they were moving all the way to California. But I don't think it really clicked with him that I wasn't going. That Dad wasn't going.

And it didn't help that my parents were so d.a.m.n clueless. They just made it worse. They weren't real smart about it. I guess they weren't thinking...

See, they had all of us go to the airport together. The moving truck had left a couple of days ago and now Mom and Jesse were flying together out to California. Dad and I drove them and walked them to the security gate and Dad gave Jesse this big hug and said, "Be good for your mother." And I wouldn't hug Mom-even though she held out her arms and waited patiently, I wouldn't do it, and I didn't want to hug Jesse either because then it was real, but he was my little brother. I had to do it.

So I hugged him and I said, "Bye, Jesse. I love you."

And that's what did it.

As I pulled away from him, I could see it in his eyes. He suddenly got it. He was going away. Three thousand miles away. And Dad and me weren't going with him. He might never see us again, for all he knew.

He started screaming. I mean, he was wailing and bawling like you wouldn't believe. It was mortifying. He wasn't a little kid, you know? He was seven, almost eight, but he didn't care. He screamed and cried at the top of his lungs. For me. For Dad. Even for Mom, which was weird because he was going with Mom.

Mom and Dad jumped into action. It was the first time I'd seen them do something together in a long time. They were trying to calm him down, trying to distract him or at least get him to quiet down a little bit. But nothing was working. He was just out of control, a little scream machine with the volume cranked all the way up.

There had been some kind of terrorist threat recently, so there was all kinds of extra security there. They were watching us. And people were slowing down to look. And the people in the security line had nothing better to do than stare, and my little brother was just determined to give them all a h.e.l.l of a show. Nothing my parents did could stop him. I tried to get in there to help, thinking that maybe that dumb-a.s.s story about Pandazilla and Aquahorse would work one more time, but Mom just pushed me back and Jesse kept putting out the decibels.

Finally, I couldn't take it anymore. I don't know where it came from, but I just screamed at him: "Jesse! Just shut the h.e.l.l up and get on the plane!"

They were the magic words. They didn't just shut up Jesse-they shut up the whole world. Everyone just stopped talking and looked at me. Mom and Dad stared. Security guys, random people-they all watched.

And my little brother hitched all his sobs back into his chest. He had snot running out of his nose and tears streaming down his face and he was now suddenly completely silent as he looked at me like I'd kicked him in the head.

I felt like the lowest form of life on the planet.

Mom wiped up his face. She took his hand and led him to the security line. He didn't fight it.

He kept his head turned the whole time, though, watching me. Watching me until I finally turned away and made Dad take me home.

Chapter 23.

They Build you up

At the end of the day, before I escape to my car and to the relative safety of home, I go to the media center. Mrs. Grant is cleaning up some books and papers at the circulation desk. All the lights are off. She gives me a look that's a modification of Fam's dog-to-the-vet look. It's worse because it's an adult doing it. When adults pity you, you know you're screwed.

"Can I help you, Kevin?"

Yeah, can you cut my head off and file it somewhere where future generations of idiots can learn from my example?

I don't say it, of course. Duh.

"No, I just..." I stop because I don't want to finish what I was going to say. It's so pathetic. I came here to ask her how she thought I did compared to Riordon. When I decided to do it, it seemed OK-she was impartial and nice and maybe I did better than I thought.

But now, standing here, with her giving me that dog-to-the-vet look ... I'm doing what Mom calls "fishing for compliments."

"Never mind," I tell her, and I turn to go.

"Wait." She comes around the desk. "Stay for a minute."

"I don't want to keep you."