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made my dad feel better to know that I wasn’t all alone in the world, that Mom had survived to take care of me. But how much better could he feel, considering that he was dead?
    Already they’d started busting people for lying about losing family members, either so everyone would feel sorry for them or so they could collect the compensation money that we were supposedly going to get. Every time I read a story like that, I wondered if Mom and I were guilty of something sort of like that. I told myself we weren’t. My real dad had really been killed. I hadn’t made it up. The fact that he wasn’t living with us hardly counted, compared to how horribly he’d died, and the fact that he was gone forever.
    My mom had started tucking me in again at night, like she used to when I was little. And once,when I was half asleep, I heard myself sort of mumbling, asking Mom if she thought we should tell someone…
    I didn’t have to finish my sentence. She knew what I meant.
    She said, “We don’t have to do anything. Except get through this and take care of each other. That’s all. That’s our job now.”
    It crossed my mind that now I might never have to tell anyone that my dad had left us before he got killed. I wondered about when I grew up and got married. Would I have to tell my wife and kids? Or would I take it with me to my grave like some terrible deep dark secret?
    Â 
    Time passed in a strange way, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. One day I woke up and it was October. That was the day my mother got a letter from the headmaster of Baileywell Preparatory Academy.
    Sometimes, when the mail was piled so high that it threatened to topple off the dining roomtable and take over the whole room, Mom and I would rouse ourselves just long enough to sort through it and at least throw out the junk mail: the credit card offers, the charity drives, the disgusting letters from realtors who had read about Dad and were wondering if we’d be wanting to sell our home. I hid a lot of mail from her: notes she’d think she had to answer.
    I was the one who first saw the letter from Bullywell Prep. I didn’t even open it. I tossed it straight in the throwaway pile.
    But there was something about it: the heaviness of the paper, the smooth cream of the envelope, the raised letters, and the crest. The crest! Something signaled authority and called out to Mom across the distance that separated the throwaway pile from her stack of unopened mail.
    â€œWhat’s that ?” she said. “What’s that fancy-looking envelope?”
    Right from the start, it was as if I heard a voice inside my head, screaming: Don’t let Mom see it! Maybe it was because whenever the subject of mynot-so-great grades had come up, she’d talked about Baileywell in a sort of dreamy way, as if it were a paradise pretending to be a school. As if it were the answer to all my problems.
    That was back when not-so-great grades were problems, back before we knew what problems were . She’d tell Dad that if only I went to someplace like Baileywell, if only we could afford to send me there, I’d be interested in school, engaged (her word). Harvard would be practically begging me to go there. And when I pointed out what everyone in town except Mom seemed to know—that it wasn’t heaven at all, but actually a hell full of vicious demon bullies—Mom had said, “Those are the kind of stories people always make up when they’re jealous.”
    â€œWhat’s that envelope?” she repeated now.
    Don’t let Mom see it!
    â€œNothing,” I said.
    â€œLet me see it,” she said.

CHAPTER THREE
    D R . B RATTON CALLED and made an appointment, and actually came to our house. I watched him from the window, parking and getting out of his big-assed Yukon. I was a little surprised, because all the teachers and administrators at my old middle school drove crappy little Toyotas or (if