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school,” I said. “Everyone in the building probably already knows.”
    “We’re going to tell her guidance counselor and the nurse, but that’s it,” my father said. “They’ll keep it quiet.”
    “Sure,” I said, remembering the kid with the head full of stitches.
    My mother gave me a look.
     
    At school Monday morning, the first two people I ran into (I didn’t know either one of them) said they felt bad about my sister, and how long did I think she would be locked up? The third person asked me what it was like on the crazy ward.
    I went to my locker to get my books. In math—a subject I ordinarily liked and did well in—we took a quiz, but I only answered about half of the questions. In English we were reading
Hamlet
out loud, and I had to read about Ophelia losing her mind.
    In history I put my head down on my desk. I just wanted to think for a few minutes but I ended up falling asleep. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I thought it would be Mr. Clearwater. He’d been Dora’s teacher in ninth grade too. (“Giant handlebar mustache,” she had warned me, rolling her eyes. “He wants all the kids to think he’s a biker.”)
    But it wasn’t Mr. Clearwater. It was Jimmy Zenk, who lived down the street from me but who I’d probably spoken to about twice in my life. Jimmy had failed at least one grade and seemed to be getting through high school on his own special schedule. Recently he had shaved a stripe through his hair so his head looked like a lawn that someone had just started mowing. “Hey. Lena. Elena Lindt.” He was sitting behind me, poking my neck with a pencil eraser. “I heard about your sister.”
    I lifted my head off the desk and wiped a ribbon of spit from my cheek. “I didn’t think you knew my name.”
    “Yeah,” Jimmy said. “I know it. I know a lot.”
    I rubbed my eyes and watched Mr. Clearwater hunt through his desk for a piece of chalk.
    Jimmy poked at my neck again.
    I waited for him to come out with some kind of weird I-shaved-my-own-head-person remark.
    “Is she at Lorning?” he asked.
    I nodded. There was only one other hospital near where we lived, and it was mostly for veterans.
    “What does she think of it?”
    I decided not to answer. Mr. Clearwater had found his chalk and was busy writing on the board.
    “I know someone who was there once,” Jimmy said. “That’s why I’m asking. Lorning’s okay for car accidents, or maybe for having your appendix out, but the psych ward has a lot of problems.”
    “What kind of problems?”
    Mr. Clearwater snapped his fingers at us. The pointed tips of his mustache, Dora had explained to me, were waxed.
    “Meet me on the bus,” Jimmy said, waving to Mr. Clearwater and not even bothering to lower his voice. “I’ll tell you then.”

15

    I almost didn’t make it to the bus because my locker was stuck and I had to kick it open. When I finally got my books and ran out of the building and found bus #20 in the lineup, I saw that Jimmy Zenk was sitting at the back with a bunch of guys in black T-shirts. I didn’t know them. Dora and I had gone to a nearby private school through the eighth grade (Creative Learning Academy), so we were both considered freaks and hopeless cases when we got to high school. Me in particular. “Don’t expect to have any friends for a while,” Dora had warned me. “There’s no welcome committee.” She was right. It was nearly October and, so far, most of the people who acknowledged me in the halls were my sister’s friends.
    We rode past the strip mall and the grocery store and turned left at the park, the bus chugging its way through a tangle of suburbs. Northern Maryland—the part where we lived—was full of suburbs with names like Babbling Creek and Willow Run and Soaring Eagle Estates. Most of the houses were alike except that some had porches (like ours) and some had an extra-large garage. I lived in Sheffield Oaks, but I wasn’t sure what an oak tree looked like.
    Jimmy Zenk got