MRS. HAYES LOOKED AT ME steadily, her fingers loosely laced together on her desk. I stared back, trying to keep my face as neutral as possible.

We had been sitting in silence for over five minutes and she’d only blinked a handful of times. If this had been a staring content, she’d have won it. Under normal circumstances, I might have been impressed. But she was a counselor, and I did not wish to be counseled.

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” I said eventually. “I told you I’m fine.”

“Your teachers are worried about you.”

“I don’t know why.”

“Okay,” she said. Then she flipped through a small notebook and consulted one of the pages. “So you don’t understand why they might be worried about you repeatedly running out of class with no explanation? About you handing in a blank sheet of paper for your English exam?”

It felt unfair to have the running-out-of-class part flung in my face, particularly since most recently I’d done that to check on Mona—a perfectly reasonable thing to do that should not have been counted against me. A reasonable thing that I didn’t feel like was mine to talk about.

“I was getting up to use the restroom,” I said. “And the English exam was a mistake.”

“Mistake” felt like a justifiable description of it. Because I had studied for that exam, had studied for it for weeks—stockpiling a rich supply of examples and opinions to use to answer questions posed in the exam. Sitting at my desk, though, my thoughts had left their tracks. Because Anna had lied to me. Not just not told me things, actively lied. Lied to get away from me.

“What do you mean, it was a mistake?”

“I wasn’t feeling well. I’m going to ask to retake it. My other grades are fine—it’s not like I’m failing any of my classes.”

She leaned forward. “This isn’t really about your academic performance. It’s about checking in with you, seeing if there’s anything we can do to make things easier. Everyone understands how hard this must be for you.”

“I’m doing fine. I just didn’t feel well yesterday. I should have gone home instead of trying to make it through the day.” I paused. “I’ve had a fragile stomach recently. That’s why I left abruptly for the bathroom too. I thought I was going to be sick.” I was proud of myself for thinking of that.

Mrs. Hayes looked at me for a long moment. And then she nodded to herself and wrote something in her notebook. Something quite long.

“What did you just write?”

“I wrote that you said you weren’t feeling well.”

“And that’s it?”

“What else do you think I wrote?”

“I don’t know, that’s why I asked.”

Her smile wavered. “Jess, did something happen? It makes sense that you’ll have ups and downs, but it had really seemed like you were finding a good path forward—joining track, hanging out with Sarah. Turning in a blank test—that’s so unlike you.”

Joining track, hanging out with Sarah. Finding a path. It hadn’t occurred to me that my behavior was being judged and monitored, that my teachers and Mrs. Hayes were grading my progress, even as they watched for cracks to form underneath the surface. I wondered if Mr. Matthews was part of this, if he’d told them about our encounter. Maybe that was what this was really about, not the English exam, not leaving class at all. Maybe that was what Mrs. Hayes was trying to get me to tell her, how my own sister hadn’t liked me, hadn’t wanted me around. If so, too bad. She could try all she liked, but I was never going to talk to her about that.

I tried to calm myself down, yet my hands itched to snatch the notebook from her hands so I could see what she’d written, see if Mr. Matthews was the one who had thrown me into this mess.

“Nothing happened,” I said.

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

She continued to stare at me. It was unnerving how good she was at it. Most people weren’t. She was good enough to unsettle me. Make me want to tell her something, anything to get her to stop staring.

Then I remembered it. The completely reasonable thing that I could tell her—that she might even already know about. Something that had upset me, quite deeply.

“There was some graffiti,” I said. “In the boys’ bathroom. About Anna. Someone mentioned it to me recently. I didn’t know about it before. It was…” I closed my eyes and saw it again, the faint image of it on the wall. “It threw me off. That someone would write something like that about her.”

Her stare softened, like it had done its job, forcing me to finally admit to a feeling she could cleanly parse and address. “I’m so sorry. Of course that upset you. Boys can be so…Well, that definitely shouldn’t have happened.”

“I don’t understand why someone would write that about her.”

“It’s hard to say. Boys’ minds can be an ugly place. There may well not be a reason. People are just cruel sometimes—lash out because they’re frustrated or jealous or because things ended badly. I wouldn’t put any stock in it.” She sighed. “I really wish no one had told you about it.”

“They didn’t mean to,” I said.

“Well, good. Some things only hurt to learn about, and they don’t change anything.”

Her phone buzzed on her desk, vibrating harshly against the wooden surface.

She glanced at it and her eyebrows went up. “I’m sorry, it’s my son’s school. Just a second.”

She picked up her phone and walked over to the window, turning her back to me. Her notebook lay on the desk, only a few feet away.

“Hello,” she said into her phone. “Is everything okay?”

I laid my hands on the desk. I wanted to know what she’d written about me. I wanted to know if Mr. Matthews had said anything about me.

“What? Peanuts? No, I don’t think…Oh, I’m so sorry.”

I slid my arms forward on the desk, as if I were stretching. My fingertips brushed against the notebook. I paused and then looked over at Mrs. Hayes. She was braced against the window, her fingers against her forehead.

“Yes,” she said, “his grandmother brought some cookies over and I didn’t think to ask. I thought they were chocolate chip.”

I leaned farther forward and I pulled her notebook back toward me, flipping it around so I could read it more easily.

Her handwriting was neat, precise.

Jess claims to have been sick. Obviously not true—already talked to parents. Denial? Depression? Compulsive lying? Recommend that she be referred to a psychologist? Psychiatrist?

Psychiatrist. Parents. I didn’t know she’d talked to them. I wondered for the first time if they hadn’t stopped believing that there was something wrong with me, if they’d just given up figuring out what. The thought stung. No, I thought, that’s not right. They know me. They know there’s nothing wrong with me. Then I thought about the coasters, about how nervous I seemed to make Mom and Dad sometimes now that Anna wasn’t there as a buffer between us.

I leafed through the previous pages, looking to see who else she’d been talking to, if Mr. Matthews had mentioned our encounter to her. She’d seemed to buy that the graffiti was the main issue, but perhaps she was socking away additional intel.

I couldn’t find anything, though. Everything else appeared to be about other students.

Then, from the corner of my eye, I saw Mrs. Hayes turning away from the window.

“Thanks,” she said, still talking into the phone. “I appreciate that. I’ll definitely be more careful in the future. I’m so glad no one got hurt.”

I thumbed back to the page she’d left off on, the page about me, and slid the notebook back across the table, retracting my hands to my lap right as she ended the call.

“I’m so sorry about that,” she said as she sat back down. “It seems I accidentally almost killed half of my son’s kindergarten class.”

“Not a problem,” I said. “I’m glad everyone is okay.”

“Me too,” she said. Then she reached for her notebook. As she did so, I realized that I’d left it oriented facing me. I watched her notice it, saw her eyes flick back to me. She opened her mouth, as if to ask me about it. I kept my face as blank as possible. Then she shook herself a little, like a dog coming in from the rain, and closed her mouth again.

“Is there anything else you’d like to tell me about, Jess?”

“No,” I said. “That’s the only thing that comes to mind.”