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Alex nods, as if this makes sense to her.

“But they told us he burned,” Sara continues, all lightness gone from her voice. “Usually it’s the smoke that gets them or whatever, but he burned. And I can’t even imagine that kind of pain. I don’t think anyone should go that way, but it’s what happened.”

“Yeah,” Alex says.

“Hey, good job killing the mood,” I tell them.

Sara shrugs. “Sorry.”

“It needed to be said,” Alex adds.

“I’m officially changing the subject.” I reach into the dollar store bag by my side, searching for something I bought while Alex wasn’t looking.

Sara’s eyes light up, and she claps her hands. “Oh, you’re going to love this,” she tells Alex.

“What?”

I whip out a plastic tiara, complete with gaudy gemstones, and put it on Alex, hooking the attached barrettes into her hair. “You’re wearing that to school on Monday,” I tell her. “It’s the Breakup Tiara.”

She nods as if this makes perfect sense, and it slips down below one eye.

“I definitely will,” she says, and we all clink bottles as it starts to snow.

47. ALEX

I have friends.

There are people who like me, and I have discovered that I like them. Today I am wearing a child’s toy on my head, walking around the school as if this were perfectly normal. When I turn my head the tips of my hair fall over my shoulder and I see the faintest shade of red shot through, enough to reflect the light. I touch my hand to it, rubbing my own hair between my fingers and thinking about the fact that somewhere in the school are two other girls with streaks exactly the same color as mine.

I feel a burst of warmth in my gut, like the fire from Claire’s backyard didn’t go out but was transferred to my insides, a place protected from the wind and snow. A place where I can think about their faces in the fire’s light and how they smiled when I talked, and answered me. How they listened and I heard them too and how we all slept on the floor in the living room, perfect trust sending our bodies into a deep unconsciousness.

“Hey, Alex, did you know that you’re a slut?” Sara yells at me from the bathroom stall as Peekay checks her makeup in the mirror.

“This is news,” I call back.

Sara comes out, buttoning her jeans. “Well, it says so in Branley’s handwriting on the back of that door, just FYI.”

“Congrats,” Claire says, expertly smudging her eyeliner with the tip of her finger. “You’ve been denounced in the bathroom. You’re officially normal.”

I take her eyeliner from her and smear out Branley’s accusation, telling Claire I’ll buy her new makeup. She laughs, and Sara takes the pen, turning my nondescript smudge into a huge piece of shit that is startlingly accurate.

There’s a code here that I never knew how to read until now, and it’s more than just the high fives other girls are giving me in the hallways when they spot my tiara. Now that I’m out, I am seeing the way some of them talk to one another, not guarded and looking for hurt, but open. The flash of teeth and the upward lilt in a voice when it’s spoken by a mouth that’s smiling; these are all things that were foreign to me.

I’m learning.

48. PEEKAY

Spring means kittens. And we are drowning in them.

It’s only April, and Rhonda says things will get worse before they get better, but that seems to be Rhonda’s attitude toward everything so I take it with a grain of salt. When Park comes in through the shelter’s front door with a box full of mewling babies, I try to tell myself my heart jumped into my throat because I like kittens—and that’s all.

We agreed that we’re just having fun for now, waiting out the last few months of high school with each other so that we don’t have to be alone. Park got a decent baseball scholarship to a private school in Kentucky, and I’m headed to the Lutheran college, where preachers’ kids get a deep discount. So there’s already a countdown clock on my new relationship, but I’ve been telling myself that I’m okay with that.

“Hey,” he calls as soon as he sees me, raising the box in the air. “We’ve got it backward, babe; you’re supposed to be the one delivering pussy.”

I swat at his arm, but not too hard. “Where’d you find them?”

“Down by Lick Creek.”