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There’s a beat, the wobbly kind where it seems anything could happen. We are still so unused to fighting that there’s no script to follow, no obvious move to anticipate next. But the last thing I’m expecting is for her to stand abruptly to leave the room.

“Where are you going?”

She pauses in the doorway, her back to me and her head turned just enough for me to see some of her chin. “To talk to your principal and straighten this suspension out before it goes on your permanent record.”

“But, Mom—”

“And when I get back, and I’ve sorted through what on earth is going on here … we need to have a talk.”

She turns fully then, stiff in that distinct way she always is when she’s dealing with Paige. It stings more than anything she could say to me.

“Yeah. Let’s talk, Ronnie.

It is somehow the worst but most effective hit I could aim in that moment. My mom is unflappable enough that I’ve seen her nearly get clipped by taxis and not so much as flinch, but the nickname seems to hit her in the one place she didn’t think to protect.

She sweeps out the door before I can see just how lasting the blow is, leaving me there with my bedhead and my laptop and an infinite void of pictures of me throwing up into various pop culture phenomena.

For a good ten minutes or so, I’m too stunned to move. There’s no distraction from the itch, the hurt, the anger—I can’t call Paige. I can’t even go to school. There’s no place to shake it off, nowhere to go.

And suddenly I need somewhere to go.

I kick off the covers, my eyes stinging, my face overheating. I grab an old pair of jeans, a T-shirt covered in cartoon doughnuts that I stole from Paige, a ratty old pair of sneakers, and yank my hair into a ponytail. I slip myself back into the me I once was, and for a few moments, in my old clothes and my old shoes and my old state of mind, I can let it go: the endless homework, the college applications, the Twitter notifications, the stupid meme.

What I can’t let go of is the way I tried just now to tell my mom my world was falling apart, and she left.

Well, if she’s allowed to leave, then so am I. I grab my wallet, my keys, the MetroCard Jack talked me through buying the other day. There’s only one place I want to go, and it’s the last place I should be.

Jack

I’m really raking in the superlatives. It kicked off with Worst Pseudo Pen Pal on the Planet, veered sharply into Worst Best Friend in the Galaxy, and now, to top it all off, Worst Son/Grandson in the Known Universe and Every Infinite Reality Hereafter.

There are so many people to apologize to, I don’t even know where to start. It feels like there’s a fire in every corner of my brain, and instead of putting any of them out, I’m just frozen and watching it spread across the room.

The mess with Pepper is terrible enough on its own. There are so many things I could have, would have, should have done — like take down that stupid picture when I saw Ethan tweet it — but the moment we heard Grandma Belly fall over in the other room, anything beyond it was out of my mind so quickly and so thoroughly, there wasn’t space for anything other than panic and this gray look on my dad’s face I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

She slipped getting out of a chair and ended up hitting her head, and in the end had a concussion and a few stitches. They released her last night, and she’s back at home and going to be fine. But that first minute when we walked in and saw her on the floor with blood on the carpet, before my dad started shouting for me to get the phone and the commotion stirred her awake, was probably the worst minute of my life.

And while that was by far the worst of it, it turns out it was just the beginning of the long, lingering shitstorm that has since taken over my life.

“I don’t even know what to do with you,” says my dad. It’s bright and early in the morning, a time when he’s usually overseeing things in the kitchen or going over our stock to put in orders to our meat and cheese suppliers, but instead we’re sitting in the Time-Out Booth so the whole world is witness to my humiliation.

Not that my dad can really do anything to me now. I can’t see how he can possibly make me feel any worse than I already do.

In the last twenty-four hours, not only have I let Pepper get turned into the meme of the week, but I’ve basically wrecked Paul’s life too. After I left to help my mom get Grandma Belly out of the hospital, Paul apparently decided to ignore everything I said to him and agreed to meet this Goldfish person on the roof of the school. After about a half hour of waiting last night it started to get dark, and Paul realized not only was he locked up there, but Goldfish had posted a picture of him stuck up there and written, can u believe this guy actually self-described as “hot”? weazel app i want my money back.

Paul didn’t even call me to tell me, and I was too busy at the hospital to be monitoring the Hallway Chat the way I usually do on and off during the afternoons. By the time I saw it, it had a comment thread a mile wide, and multiple unflattering photoshops of Paul with bad captions alluding to him being on the dive team like, dumpster diving? and looks like someone dove in with two (hobbit) feet.

The first thing I did was break my one rule and trace Goldfish back to some girl named Helen, a known bully in the senior class. The second thing I did was email Rucker to turn her in — and myself right with her.

I should have known it would only make things worse. As far as I know, Helen’s off scot-free, Paul’s still embarrassed out of his mind and not talking to me, and not only am I suspended for a week, but — plot twist — Pepper’s suspended for two days for not ratting me out when she had the chance.

The TL;DR: Paul hates me. Pepper hates me. And it’s only a matter of time before it gets around that I made Weazel, and then the whole school will hate me too. There isn’t one corner of my life I haven’t actively sabotaged, and I’m so far past rock bottom, I’m basically in the earth’s molten core.

Hence, the most pointless father-son guilt trip in the whole of human history. My dad could literally start spitting flames right now, and I’d probably just tilt myself over and lean into the blast.

“I’m sorry, Dad.”

And I am. I really am. Just not particularly at him, because it seems like he and Mom are the people least affected by this entire thing. And the people who are most affected, I could be spending this time getting in touch with, instead of being on the receiving end of a lecture within earshot of half of the morning egg-and-cheese-bagel rush.

“What were you thinking?”

I open my mouth to tell him just that, about what Weazel actually is — or was, I guess, since I disabled the whole thing last night. But he doesn’t even let me get a word in edgewise. Instead, he leans farther into the table, propping his elbow above the spot where Ethan carved a Superman logo when we were kids, and lets out a Dad-sized sigh.

“You’re on shift immediately after dive practice and every weekend for the next month,” he says, without even looking at me.

I laugh. On the list of appropriate reactions I could have had, this is so far down that for a moment my dad doesn’t even seem to process it, looking over at me, temporarily stunned out of his anger.

“Jack.”

The laugh has now dissolved into an undignified snort, and before I know it, I’m saying, “Honestly, Dad, if that’s ‘punishment,’ looks like I’m grounded for life, huh?”