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“A tough time,” I repeat. “And we wouldn’t want to make that any worse, right?”

“Oh, no,” Gladys says, but Walton is watching me, suddenly aware that there’s blood in the water, and it’s probably not mine.

“Or tarnish his reputation,” I continue. “Maybe we’re even worried about his feelings a little bit?”

“Very much,” Gladys says, like the self-worth of incompetent guidance counselors are at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But none of this is a surprise to me. I’ve lived in Henley my whole life, so I know this game. We’re all going to be nice. We’re all going to say the right thing and not use words that could hurt. The only salt that gets passed around in this town is at the dinner table in private homes. In public, we might as well be spitting fudge in each other’s mouths, we’re so damn sweet.

But I’m Lydia Chass, and I’m done with that. Being a Chass means two things—people expect you to be nice and polite, and I expect to get my way. Sometimes those two things are in conflict with each other; this is one of those times.

“So, let’s not blame Mr. Benson,” I say, getting up from my chair and crossing over to the darkened room. The knob turns in my hand, and I breeze into Benson’s office, the motion-sensor lights flickering to life above me.

“Lydia! Wait!” Gladys’s rolling chair hits the wall behind her, just as Principal Walton says, “You can’t just—”

Of course, someone who knocks on open doors would think that I can’t just.

But I can, because I choose to, and I will, and because I am Lydia Chass, and they’re about to find out that if they’re going to screw with me, they’re going to need more than muttered apologies and one-shouldered shrugs.

“It’s okay!” I tell Gladys as I reach for the bottom left-hand drawer of Benson’s desk. “I don’t blame him,” I reassure her when it slides open. “I blame this.”

I set the half-empty bottle of Jim Beam in the center of the former guidance counselor’s desk. I rest my hand on the lid, tilting the bottle back and forth as I talk, listening to the slosh of the bourbon inside.

“We can’t blame Mr. Benson and hurt his feelings, tarnish his reputation, or get the board and administration in any type of trouble,” I say. “So we’ll blame this bottle. I’m happy with that for now, as long as your idea about how to fix this is a good one.”

“Well, Lydia,” Walton says, clearing his throat and eyeing my palm as I roll the bottle under it. “The board and I thought an independent study project could be a substitute for your missing history credit. Assuming, of course, that it’s of sufficient scope and depth—”

I tap my ring finger against the neck of the bottle; the circle of metal there—part of a meteorite whose trajectory I calculated in fifth grade—rings against the glass, reminding him that scope and depth are not going to be a problem. NASA representatives have only been pictured in the Henley Hometown Headlines once, and they didn’t come here to meet him.

On the other hand, I don’t think I can barge into the offices of the state Department of Education and start opening desk drawers and flashing space junk while demanding that they change graduation requirements because my guidance counselor was a drunk. The truth is that verbally sparring with Walton and Gladys might be a great outlet for my rage, but in the end, I’m going to have to take whatever deal they give me.

And I’ll scope and depth the crap out of it.

“All right,” I say, and they both visibly relax. I toss the bottle of Jim Beam at Walton, and he snatches it out of midair. There might be an ex-athlete under all those desk Twinkies and gas station sandwiches, but he’s buried deep, and he doesn’t have the recovery time to stop me when I open the second drawer to unearth a baggie of unmarked pills.

“And if Mr. Beam doesn’t want to take the blame,” I tell them, “we can always pass it off on Mr. Benzo, am I right?”

Two

“So what was that all about?” MacKenzie asks in yearbook class.

On my schedule it’s listed as a publishing class, but what that really means is that MacKenzie and I are camped out on bean bag chairs in the corner of Mrs. Wilhelm’s earth science room. There aren’t enough people interested in being on yearbook—or enough students in the high school—to justify having an entire block dedicated to it. So MacKenzie and I just kind of chill and occasionally upload pictures or format things on our laptops.

I’m working on the cross-country pages right now, flipping through the five different action shots we have and deciding if I want to pretend that I care about the sport by making sure everyone gets some exposure, or if I should just feature the sole senior—Brian Phillabrant. Unfortunately, he’s extremely sweaty and seems to be in an incredible amount of pain in all the pics, so I decide to go for the group ensembles instead.

“Why do people even run?” I ask MacKenzie, blowing up a shot of Brian’s face until his anguish pixelates, turning my screen around for her to get a look.

“It burns calories and builds character,” she says, glancing up. “And are you just going to ignore me or what?”

“Probably ignore you,” I say, turning my laptop back around. “Why? Did you say something?”

She makes sure Wilhelm isn’t looking and then flicks me off. “Why’d you get called to the office?”

Of course this was coming. Lydia Chass was called to the office, and everyone is probably wondering if there was Xanax in my locker or if Harvard said no thanks, and a team of purebred emotional-support dogs have been summoned in to console me. While I’ll be landing on the senior personalities Most Likely to Succeed category in the yearbook, if there were a Thinks She’s Better Than Everyone Else page, it would be my picture, full-frame. I’ve always aimed high and never made a secret of it.

And while it would feel really good to throw Mr. Benson under the bus and tell my bestie about his utter failure at his job, I can’t quite bring myself to do it. He hadn’t even blinked when I trotted into his office as a freshman and told him I needed the most rigorous academic schedule possible and that he had four years to cultivate contacts at Columbia, Emerson, Princeton, and maybe NYU if I decided to lower my expectations.

Benson never sat me down and reminded me that I’m from Henley. Benson never said that I should keep in mind that the only truly famous person in our Hall of Fame (located directly across from the bathrooms) is the CEO of a plastics factory who is currently in jail for violating roughly thirty-five different EPA regulations. Benson encouraged me, right up until I detected the alcohol on his breath and the tremors in his hands. He’d lost focus by then, either constantly checking his phone while we met or staring off into the space over my left shoulder, depending on whether he’d popped a bennie yet or not.

The truth is that the game that Walton and Gladys wanted me to play with them back in the guidance office is one I know all the rules to: be nice, smile, and nod. The efficacy of that approach has put families like mine at the top of the Henley food chain over generations, proof that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. But I’ve got a lot of vinegar inside of me, and keeping the stopper in has become harder and harder as I get older.