School is dark. Only the wing with the pool is lit and warm; the heat and lights in the main part of the building won’t kick on for another half hour. But it’s an unspoken agreement: I’m forbidden from hanging out near Jeremy, lest we actually be seen within a thousand yards of each other.

Pulling my coat tight, I head toward the office. Ms. Franklin usually comes in early with muffins and coffee. We’ve struck up quite the friendship based on baked goods and caffeinated beverages. The gym is on the way. I don’t want to go near that hellhole, but my backpack is orphaned there, and it’s better to stage a rescue than to risk Ms. Gliss confiscating it and making me do laps or scrub toilets to get it back. So I zip my jacket higher, pull up my hood, and march. Fricking Hellmouth Death Star Gym was bad before, and it’s managed to get worse. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to block out not one, but two accidents. The memories crash over me like a tsunami. Unstoppable, overpowering, unpredictable.

Good times.

All this goes on inside my head, over and over, slow motion, while outside my head things are supposed to be normal.

Bleh. Two weeks after Jamie died, when I finally came back to school, there were three Big Differences:

1. The indisputable fact of Jamie’s absence. The fibers of my heart ached with loneliness. (They still do.) I kept turning around, starting to talk to her. And then. Yeah. Your BFF’s dead. These feelings crowding your heart? They’re called Rage. Impotence. Dread. Loneliness. Fear. Sadness. Grief. Magical Thinking. Too bad Denial didn’t stick around for long.

2. Jamie’s main locker was a Battlestar Galactica-esque, quasi-roadside, semi-gravestoney, dead person site. It looked like someone with Rainbow-Unicorn food poisoning puked all over it. Construction Paper and Sharpie Marker Tribute Vomitus. Seriously, the hypocrisy. It was worse than her Facebook timeline.

3. The gym’s folding wall, gone. The day Jamie died—literally that very afternoon—Dad ordered all collapsible walls dismantled and removed, district-wide, overnight. Lawsuits, accountability, safety.

Request for information: Who, specifically, took the gym’s wall down? Did they know why they were called in at whatever hour of the night? They must have. Was there still blood on the carpety wall surface? Did they just leave it, or clean it off? Had they done that kind of cleaning before—the kind with blood and death?

These. These are the questions that spin through my brain. Is it any wonder I’m a mess?

I squint into the window of the gym door. A blue plastic tarp is duct-taped over the broken window. The deer is gone, but there is still a stain the color of chocolate smeared on the floor.

Somebody’s slacking. Shouldn’t all this have been cleaned up by now?

Sweat prickles my armpits; the hairs on my arms stand up.

There’s a flicker of movement in the gym. Something gray shudders in and out of view. What the…?

I lean in to get a better look. There it is again: some sort of animal. Like a big gray rat, or a stringy-haired little dog, sniffing around the stain in odd, twitchy movements.

Great. Just what I need, another bizarre creature encounter.

But my backpack. People will start showing up before long. Ms. Gliss, especially—I’ve been cutting gym so much that she’d just love to have something to ransom.

I need to grab it now and get it over with. I suck in a deep breath. Whatever’s in there—rat, or dog, or warthog, or other creature from the Tenth Circle of Hell—I’ll just grab my bag and run.

But it isn’t a dog or a rat. It’s a mop. Which means I’m officially bonkers. DSM-IV Diagnosis HAG: (Hallucinating Animals in the Gym.)

Holding the mop is a man—older than Dad, younger than Grandpa—who is not one of the regular custodians. He’s wearing a set of navy blue coveralls and a leather tool belt holding various spray bottles and rags. One is a particularly large, bulky rag.

Wait. It isn’t a rag. It’s…a possum. Which clearly means I’m having consecutive episodes of Hallucinating Animals in the Gym.

But, yes. It is a possum, hanging upside down, its tail curled around the man’s belt.

Well that’s normal. I mean, who isn’t accessorizing with possum these days? It’s almost passé at this point.

Captain Possum sets down his mop. The possum lifts its head and looks up, its tiny coal eyes glinting. The man walks toward me; the possum’s whole body sways with his steps, plunking against the man’s leg.

My mouth is open. I bet I look like I’ve just seen a man with a possum hanging from his belt.

Captain Possum says, “Just cleaning up here, didn’t expect to see anyone. That yours.” He says it like a statement: That yours, but he tips his head to one side and goes quiet, like it is a question he wants answered.

All I can do is nod.

“I’ll be done cleaning up this, uh…spill…soon, if you need the gym. You need the gym.” Another statement, but he waits like he expects an answer.

I shake my head and pick up my bag. Something about the way he hesitated before he said the word spill irks me.

“Spill?” I ask him innocently.

“Yep. Accident yesterday.”

He knows something. How much, though? Does he know someone was in here when the deer crashed through? Does he know it was me?

“Accident?” I ask.

“Yep.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“No students hurt.”

“No students were hurt?” I narrow my eyes. “Does that mean someone else was hurt? Or something else?”

The man’s face changes. His good-natured expression fades. He sets his hands on his hips, just above his Possum-Holder Belt. “If there’s something you’re asking, wish you’d just come out with it. Still got work here.” He doesn’t sound mean, exactly. But it’s definitely a warning that he isn’t big on snotty teenagers. Which, to the untrained eye, I can sometimes resemble. A little.

I cross my arms. I don’t know why, but I’m compelled to say, “I was here when it happened.” I was here when the deer burst through the window. And also when my best friend died.

One eyebrow lifts.

“What did they do with the deer?” I ask. Suddenly I have to know. I don’t even know why I have to know—I just do. With Jamie, the ambulance came and took her to the hospital. But what do they do with dead animals? What if they just threw the deer in the dumpster? It’s too sad to contemplate.

And whenever there’s something that’s too sad to contemplate, it’s all I can contemplate. I’ve got this slide show in my brain, see, and maybe if I have more information I can shut it down?

“They.” Captain Possum rubs his chin. “They. Reckon they hired me to take care of it. And since your concern is personal, I’ll tell you. Took it away last night. Patched up the window”—he nods toward the tarp—“until the glass gets replaced. Got late, so I came back this morning to finish up.”

“Took the deer away. To where?” My hands are shaking. I’m coming unglued and I do not like it. Not one little bit.

He regards me a long time, as if I’m a puzzle he can figure out, as if he’s measuring whether he will tell me. “Took it away from here.”

So. It’s war. He’s not going to tell me. He thinks I’m just some stupid, fragile teenager.

“Need to finish up,” he says. “I’ll lock the door behind you. Meant to do that before. Nice meeting you, uh…”

“Sarah,” I manage to say through what is now fury.

“Sarah.”

He ushers me out of the gym and locks the door.

I am pissed. Seething. He can’t kick me out of the gym like that! I put my bag over my shoulder and bolt down the hall. Condescend much, Captain Possum?

My cheeks burn. I’m so mad. The thing is, I know it’s more than the situation warrants. It’s a Disproportionate Response. That’s what one of the counselors called it. Disproportionate Response, subtitled: Being Full Of Rage All The Time, Ready To Explode For Any Reason. She said it means that something else is going on. That there’s another “issue” at play.

She loved the word “issue,” loved to make air quotes around it. As in, what’s the real “issue”?

The real “issue” is that the gym is a fracking nightmare. It was months before I could breathe in that room again, let alone get my ass kicked at dodgeball. Now I have to start all over. My best friend died there and so did this deer and there is no other soul on this earth who can understand how I feel.

I go to the office. Ms. Franklin is standing at the teachers’ mail cubbies. She smiles and waves me over. But her friendliness is too much to take. I leave the office. And then I keep going.

I didn’t plan it. I’m on autopilot. People are starting to come in and I just…make my way out, past kids with cold noses, puffy jackets, heavy backpacks.

Dr. Folger is in his customary spot at the main entrance. I duck my head, hoping he won’t notice me.

“Hello, Ms. Jones.”

Crap muffins. I turn around. “Hi, Dr. Folger.”

“Having a better day than yesterday, I hope.”

“Sure.” Somehow I know that this is all we will ever say about the deer.

“Well. That’s good,” he says. With his thumbnail, he chips off graffiti, written in Wite-out on the doorjamb. “You look as if you are leaving.”

Astute observation, sir. “Yeah.”

He waits for me to offer an explanation: dentist appointment, stomach flu, anything.

But I don’t. The thought of having to lie to him makes me tired.

I expect Dr. Folger to tell me to go back inside. But he surprises me. “Well,” he says, “have a good weekend.” Then he does his dorky, quasi-Japanese bow.

I take off fast, before he changes his mind. As I walk, the cold seeps into my feet and onto my face, and a thought occurs to me: maybe Dr. Folger could see that I needed to get out of there. Maybe he was being kind.

Maybe I should know better.