Mom made me stay home from school on Tuesday. I told her the crash wasn’t a big deal — some glass got smashed up. That was it. There was no tragedy — but she insisted, and I decided to stop arguing. Whatever. I was happy to take a day off from school.

All morning I lay in bed half-asleep, blissfully zoned out, watching movies. I got through three by lunchtime. It’s crazy how productive you can be when you start watching movies at seven a.m.

I fell asleep in the afternoon, and when I woke up, the sun was shining through my windows and I had four texts. Will asked what happened. Luke asked when I was coming back to school. Emma and Alex both asked if I was okay. God. Mom must have told Luke’s mom, and she’d probably exaggerated some absurd story about how I miraculously survived a forty-five-car pileup where everyone else died and all the other cars exploded into fireballs around me but her son was just so special he made it out. The texts annoyed me. This didn’t have to be a big deal. I was gone from school for one day. I hadn’t even broken a bone. There was no blood. I was unscathed and unchanged and there was nothing to talk about.

I didn’t respond to the texts. I put in disc three of the Clerks DVD and watched all the special features, thinking I should wreck cars all the time so I could have more days off.

Mom drove me to school Wednesday morning, and I made the mistake of closing my eyes. She kept asking me if I was okay, which was annoying because I was honestly just tired, so I forced my eyes open so she’d stop questioning me.

Patrick hugged me in the hallway in front of the guys in the morning, and I stood there with my arms at my sides, waiting for him to start pretending to have sex with me. But when he didn’t, I shrugged him off and told them all I was fine and there was no reason to even talk about it.

Alex and Emma sat with us at lunch. Alex asked if I was okay. Everyone turned to stare at me.

“What? Yeah, I’m fine — I’m totally fine. It’s really not a big deal at all. It was like, really small.”

Emma tilted her head. “My mom heard from Luke’s mom that both cars got totaled. Like, completely destroyed.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, moms exaggerate.” I stared into the table, waiting for them to start talking about anything else. I didn’t want to think about it because there wasn’t anything to think about.

The rest of the girls came by to see if I was okay. It was weird. I couldn’t tell if they really cared about me or if I was just some freak show object for them to ogle at for the day. Someone told me Todd Lancaster was busy doing a project in the library but he’d said he was glad I was okay. Whatever.

“So, how did it, like, happen?” Sam said.

I shrugged. “I was driving through my neighborhood and the other guy went through a stop sign and hit me.”

“Damn,” Sam said. “It must have been terrifying. He drove straight at you?”

“Well, no. He, like, T-boned into me from the left. I didn’t see him coming. My car was fine one second and then it was wrecked and then I went home and went to sleep. That’s really all there is to it. Sorry this isn’t interesting at all.”

I kept telling them I was fine and after a while they finally started talking about other things.

By Thursday no one cared about the wreck anymore. Luckily some senior girl got arrested for shoplifting sports bras at the mall, so everyone was talking about that.

I knew I should have been studying for finals and figuring out something to turn in as my project for Meyer, but I wasn’t in the mood to do work. When I got home, I watched movies in my room and stayed awake until I couldn’t find any more websites to read.

Through my doorframe, I saw Kate creep out of her room at two fifteen a.m. My index finger automatically closed the browser window, even though the thread I’d been reading about symbolism in A.I. Artificial Intelligence was far from pornographic. “Why are you up?” I said.

“Hungry.” She shrugged, heading downstairs.

She’d made me realize I was hungry, too, and I found her in the kitchen, standing in front of the open fridge, zoned out. The same way I’d stand there when there was something in my head I couldn’t get out, and Mom would yell at me that I was wasting electricity. Seeing Kate do it, I saw what Mom was talking about. Close that door before you ruin the milk, young lady.

She sighed aggressively and slammed the door, almost like she’d been waiting for me to watch her do it.

She stomped over to the island and yanked the silverware drawer open loud enough to wake Mom and Dad.

“What’s your problem?” I said.

“I’m hungry.”

“You’re obviously mad about something. Just tell me.”

She sighed, closed her eyes, and spoke into the drawer. “Am I a bitch?”

Oh, no. “What?”

“Courtney’s going to orchestra camp in two weeks and I’m not going because I’m not in orchestra.”

“O-kay . . .”

“So Courtney found out Priya Leghari is going to the same camp, and we barely ever even talk to Priya Leghari, but all of a sudden they’re best friends and they said they drank a beer at Priya’s mom’s house last weekend and they’re making all these plans and talking about how it’s gonna be the best summer ever and so I didn’t give Courtney the birthday card I made for her and she found out and got mad and called me a bitch in front of everyone.”

“Wait — you made her a card? For her birthday?”

She looked up at me. “Yeah . . .”

“Huh,” I said, confused by such blatant displays of affection between friends.

“How come you and Luke and the other guy never fight?”

She had an interesting perspective on the perpetual pseudo-feud between me and my supposed best friends. “We do,” I said. “It’s just . . . different, I guess.”

We stood facing each other for what felt like three hours. It was by far the longest amount of time I’d ever spent in a room with Kate by ourselves.

“So?” she said impatiently.

I jumped. “So what?”

She rolled her eyes. “So what should I do? About Courtney?”

“Oh. I guess . . . Why don’t you, uh, just find some random other girl and start making plans with her, real loud, when Courtney walks by?”

Kate narrowed her eyes at me.

“Just say you’re gonna, like, go on a life-changing cross-country road trip with this girl to meet whichever celebrity your grade thinks is cool. Then Courtney will be, like, ‘Goddamn, I should’ve kept hanging out with Kate this summer. Priya Leghari’s the worst.’”

Kate’s face soured. “That’s your advice?”

I shrugged. “Wait, do you still have the card?”

“Yeah. Why?” she asked suspiciously.

“You should just give it to her. You have the card made for her, so what else are you gonna do with it? It’s pretty much just trash to anyone except her if her name’s on it.”

“My card’s not trash.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” I said, holding my hands out to tame her like she was a lion. “I just mean you can’t do anything else with it, right? So just give it to her and you’ll be the better person. Take your emotions out of it and take the high road.”

She balled her hands into fists, grunted, “Ugh!” and stomped past me upstairs.

Jesus. Sorry for trying to help. I took a Pop-Tart from the pantry back to my room. I scrolled through more forum posts, but after a while I was only thinking about Kate

What had I told her? “Take your emotions out of it and take the high road”? I’d said it without even thinking, factory-produced nonsense that had infected my mind from movies or books or made-for-TV movies based on books. A preprogrammed script like “What’s up? Not much. You?” that our brains use to coast through life. Realizing the advice had spilled out of me the same way it would from an unprepared substitute teacher freaked me out. How much longer until I loaded up more of these manufactured slogan bullets and suddenly I’m an adult sleepwalking through workweeks while my esophagus burst-fires, How are you? I hate Mondays. It’s hump day. I’m working for the weekend. Thank god it’s Friday.

What the hell was I doing giving advice, anyway? The highlight of my week was receiving an email from Amazon about other DVDs I might enjoy.

I licked the last Pop-Tart crumbs off my fingers and vowed to stay out of Kate’s middle-school business.