"Fine," I said. "Think what you want to think."

"I think that you're a mess. But not that kind of a mess. I like you. But I wish you wouldn't lie to me. You don't have to. You can tell me true things. You can tell me nothing at all. But I don't like you lying."

"You want me to tell you a true thing? Okay, and I never told anyone this before." I truly hadn't. I could feel myself holding my breath, getting ready to let it out. But Zach laughed.

"Never told anyone before? Tayshawn said that's what you said when you told him about being a girl and a boy."

"Tayshawn told you that?" I asked, leaning against the wall, making myself smaller. Talking was making Zach not want to touch me. I wanted us to stop talking and start kissing.

"Tayshawn's my boy. You told him you'd never told anyone before, but then you went and told Chantal and Brandon and I don't know who else."

"Well, they were giving me grief for pretending I was a boy. I wanted to shut them up."

Zach didn't say anything but I could tell that he didn't believe me. Fair enough. It was a lie: I told them for the attention, for the pleasure of fooling them, for the look of shock on their faces.

Zach put his thumb to my mouth like he didn't want to hear it. My lips felt warm and tingling.

"How long you been lying for?" he asked. "Tayshawn thinks you don't know how to tell the truth. Why is that?"

"How come you and Tayshawn talk about me?" I asked. I didn't want to answer his questions. "I thought we were a secret!"

"We're guys, we don't talk about nothing. Not like girls do. I never told him about you and me. We're a secret. It was before, when everyone was talking about you."

"Great."

Zach laughed. "Well, you pa.s.s for a boy, you lie inside out-people talk." He held my face in both hands and then kissed me, a short closed-mouth kiss. Not the kind of kiss I was longing for. "How long you been lying?"

"All my life," I said, because he wanted honesty.

That's the truth. I don't know if Zach believed me, but I hope you do. Because you're the only one I've never lied to.

"What?" Zach asked, pulling his hands away. "When you were a baby in your crib sucking on your pacifier you were telling lies?"

"Okay, so maybe I haven't been lying always. But from the time I started talking. I learned it from my parents. Well, my dad mostly. My mom's lies are white ones. 'You look fine.' 'Oh, is that what time it is?' You know."

"Regular lies."

I agreed. "What about you? What kind of lies do you tell?"

"Regular ones. And as few as possible. I don't like 'em."

"Why not?"

He shrugged. "It's not right."

"What do you tell Sarah when you're with me?"

"White lies. The kind that don't harm anyone. But your lies are crazy. Why would you pretend you was a boy? That you were born messed up? Why do you lie all the time?"

"If you've got a big secret it's best to paper it over with lots of little ones."

"So what's your big secret, huh?"

The moment had pa.s.sed. I wasn't going to tell him about the family illness. "I can't tell you."

"I'll tickle it out of you," he said, going for my armpits.

"No!" I yelled, trying to roll away, but I was against the wall. "You will not!"

I grabbed for his wrists. He twisted away. He was on top of me and then I was on top of him and we were going around and around and there was less tickling and yelling and mouths were close and hearts were beating faster and I forgot what he was asking. Lost it in the taste of his mouth. The feel of his tongue and lips against mine.

"Micah," Zach breathed, "I don't care what you are."

I did.

Do.

HISTORY OF ME.

You're wondering if we slept together, aren't you?

I know you are. It's what everyone wants to know. Did they?

Then there's me telling you about us in bed together. With no mention of whether our clothes are on or off. And we're doing what?

Talking.

You don't believe that's all we did, do you? Not with all that tickling and kissing and stuff. You want to know what else we did together. How far it went. First base? Second? Third? All the way home?

You know I'm on the pill so it's not like I'd get pregnant. You know I'm old enough. It wouldn't make me a s.l.u.t, would it? He was my only one. But then there's Sarah-Zach's real girlfriend. She's allowed to think that I'm a s.l.u.t, isn't she? I mean, it's her boyfriend we're talking about. If she's allowed, then everyone else can think it, too. Sleeping with someone else's boy is the definition of s.l.u.t.

Except that, as it happens-and not that this is any of your business-we weren't.

We didn't.

It was kissing and holding and hugging. Lots of kissing. But we never took our clothes off. Never got past that very first base. He didn't touch mine; my fingers got nowhere near his.

See?

I am a good girl after all.

I didn't kill him either.

AFTER.

For the first time in my life I want to be up at the farm, out of school, and out of the city. I want to go running with Hilliard. Have him show me some new tricks.

I know that after a few days up there I'll be longing to be back home, but right this instant it's what I want.

School is too much.

But I make myself go anyway.

A day in bed was more than I could stand. Dad worrying over me was too much. Everything is too much.

In the hall, Tayshawn nods at me. I nod back. He's always been nice to me. I don't know why. I've heard that the police have been interviewing him at home, too.

No one else greets me. They stare. They talk about me, but not to me.

I eat my lunch in Yayeko Shoji's room. She's not one of the popular teachers. It's not one of the popular rooms. I can sit in bio, eat, look at the diagrams and posters on the wall, think about evolution and fast-twitch muscles, entropy, death, and decay.

Zach.

All right, the biology room is not such a good idea. But what doesn't remind me of Zach? Of what happened to him. What place in this school, this city, is safe for me now?

Nowhere.

There are seven more months of school left. I don't think I'm going to make it.

But if I go upstate now I might not ever finish school.

Worse, if I go upstate now I'll miss the funeral.

AFTER.

I haven't been entirely honest. I mean, I have been about the facts. About Zach and the police. How awful it was at school, at home. My family history. My illness. How I showed Zach foxes. How everyone suspects me, if not of killing Zach, then of something.

I haven't made myself out to be better than I am. Or worse.

But I haven't been entirely honest about my insides. How it is in my head and my heart and my veins.

Let me come clean: This is what it felt like when the princ.i.p.al strode into the room to tell us that Zach was dead: Sharp and cold and wrong.

Like the world had ended.

I thought I knew what the princ.i.p.al was going to say. I thought I knew that Zach was dead. Zach had been missing since Sat.u.r.day. If he'd been found alive he would have texted me. The princ.i.p.al didn't drop in on cla.s.srooms, not unless something was seriously wrong.

But I'd been hoping. I'd been praying that I was wrong, that Princ.i.p.al Paul was going to say something else. That Zach had been found and was coming back to school. He could have lost his cell phone. He could be in the hospital with a broken leg. Hurt but nothing serious.

I sat there staring at the princ.i.p.al, thinking about everything Zach had ever said to me. That he needed me. That he depended on me. That the smell of me could keep him going all day.

Or did I say that to him?

Him being dead confuses things.

I know he told me that what we had wasn't love. It was something stronger. Me and him weren't like him and Sarah, or him and anyone else. Or any two people together ever.

Zach said that.

Then he went away. He didn't come back.

I thought he would. I was sure he would. Even now, I'm waiting for him.

I wore the mask to keep my face unmoving and unseen. To keep everything inside where it belonged.

When the words were leaving Princ.i.p.al Paul's mouth-in that moment-I wanted to leap at him. Hold his mouth shut. Or tear out his throat.

Keep the words in.

Because maybe then Zach would be alive.

And I wouldn't be so alone.

BEFORE.

One of the true things I told the police was that Dangerous Words was the last cla.s.s I had with Zach before he disappeared that weekend-before he was murdered. It's not nearly as good as bio but it's the only other cla.s.s I don't actively hate. Partly because Lisa Aden is a blusher and partly because she's pretty smart and sometimes it's kind of interesting hearing about what gets banned, how the meanings of words have changed, censorship. All that stuff.

We need signed permission from our parents to take it. Because in Dangerous Words we're allowed to use any dirty words we want. But none of us does. It doesn't feel like we really can. It feels like a trick.

The only time we say dirty words in that room is when we're reading out loud. Some of the a.s.signed books have them. But it feels awkward and forced and we stumble over the same words that, outside the cla.s.sroom, flow from our mouths easy as lies.

Most of our mouths. I've never heard Sarah swear.

No one said any of the words we were supposedly allowed to say. Not until the teacher, Lisa Aden, invited a guest the Friday before Zach was killed. A writer. A foreign writer, from England or something. I wasn't paying attention when he was introduced or when he started talking. I didn't listen to a thing until he picked up a piece of chalk and wrote all the worst words on the board. One by one. Then everyone was paying attention to the chalk in his hands and the words he made.

He wrote each word up on the board, then he said each as if it weren't any different from saying "yes" or "no" or "pie" or "sky." After each word he wrote a date. Really old dates. Every single word was hundreds of years old. From the 1300s or 1400s or 1500s. I tried to imagine people in the olden days saying them, but I couldn't.

"These dates, of course," he said, "refer to the earliest written records, but it's very likely the words themselves are much older. Much. But they were not written down. This is often true of taboo words. Until very recently written language has tended to be more formal than spoken."

He stopped and looked at us like we were supposed to say something. I noticed Lisa Aden had changed color. Even whiter than usual, except for her cheeks, where all the blood in her body seemed to have gathered.

"Of course, some of these words weren't always taboo. And the way we use them now is not necessarily the same as how they were originally used. Words change. I'm sure your teacher has mentioned how the word 'girl' originally meant a child of either s.e.x."

She hadn't.

"This is my favorite." He tapped the worst word on the board and underlined it. The red in Lisa's cheeks spread. "Here in America it's probably the most shocking. But back home, where I come from, there's little force behind it. In fact, it usually gets used as a synonym for 'lad' or 'bloke.' "

"What's a bloke?" Zach asked. His voice buzzed in my ears even though he was at the back of the room.

"A guy. A fella. A man."

"So you wouldn't say, 'those guys over there'?" Zach asked. I didn't turn to look at him. "You'd say, 'those-' "

"Yes." The writer nodded.

Lisa Aden was starting to sweat. I could smell it on her.

"What if they're your friends?" Zach wanted to know. "Or you weren't mad at them?"