“I’m not going to English today.”

It was the Monday after the news about our Severin scholarship eligibility, after our Barrelz and Bootz night. (The morning after, groaning like the rattle of a spoon in a coffee can, I’d looked down and found my sleeping bag rolled tight and Diane gone.)

She looked at me now, wan and slightly greasy in a way Diane never was.

“You never miss class,” I said. “Didn’t you read act three?”

“Of course I did,” she said. “I read the whole play.”

“So come on, then,” I said, putting my hand on her arm harder than I meant to—I almost never touched her; who could?—her body shuddering into the classroom, its lights so bright.

Maybe I was mad still about the things she’d said Saturday night. Maybe I was mad because Sunday morning after she left, I sat and stared at those sneakers Stevie Shoes had given me, buried in the back of my closet. Finally, I dumped them in the trash beneath coffee grounds and potato peels. No running for me until payday.

“There you are,” said Ms. Cameron, smiling at us, her star pupils. “Now we can begin.”

“Class,” Ms. Cameron announced, “something is wrong in the state of Lanister High.” It was just the kind of so-lame-it’s-cool thing at which Ms. Cameron, with her Call of Cthulhu T-shirt and her Buddha bracelets and her thick sandals even in the winter, excelled.

“Ugh,” moaned Ashley Moon, barely looking up from her phone. “Ms. Cameron, it’s too late for Shakespeare. We graduate in a few months.”

“That’s why it’s exactly the right time,” Ms. Cameron said.

She loved to tell us that Hamlet was the ultimate adolescent. Childhood suddenly over, disillusioned by adults, lust-conflicted, seeking to supplant his parents. All of which made adolescence sound so dramatic, which maybe it was and maybe was why I wished it were over.

“Can we talk about when Ophelia gives Hamlet back all the stuff he gave her?” asked Melissa, chewing hungrily on her pen. “And he tells her to become a nun?”

All the girls in class loved Ophelia because in paintings and in the DVDs we watched, she was so fragile and ethereal and doomed, one after the other, pale blond nymphs with long wispy tendrils and flowers falling in slow motion, Ophelia sinking into a stream, a swimming pool, a bathtub. One glorious, glamorous scene after another of Ophelias erasing themselves.

She was not for me. My legs were thick and strong and I never spun languorous in floral dresses or let a boy call me a whore. Even my mom—once a pliant woman, or why else did she put up with my dad for all those years?—was still the type who, when not bagging dead cats and taking hacksaws to rabid dog brains, might choose to wield a hot clothes iron rather than let my dad sneak off with her car after his got impounded. We were not Ophelias, even though we had our weaknesses.

But I loved the play. There were so many parts that sang darkly in my brain. You would seem to know my stops, Hamlet tells his backstabbing friends. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery.

Sitting in class, looking at that line, I thought of Diane. Diane and the things that had happened to her and how much I knew, yet how little. Was that what I was doing with her, circling closer, trying to pluck the heart of her mystery?

“So, let’s turn to Hamlet’s treacherous uncle,” Ms. Cameron said. “What do we learn of Claudius in act three?”

“That he did do it,” I said. “That he killed Hamlet’s dad.”

Diane’s head was bobbing a little. She hadn’t said a word since class began, her book still closed on her desk.

“That’s right, Kit,” Ms. Cameron said, eyes now on Diane. “And how do we know?”

Next to me, Diane pressed her fingers to her temples. Her face looked soft and waxy under the fluorescent lights. Almost like an apple gone bad.

“He talks about the whole thing,” piped up Tim Streeter from the back. “I don’t get why villains always do that. Like in Batman—”

“Is Claudius the villain here?” Ms. Cameron replied, looking first at Tim, slack-mouthed at the question itself.

“He has no conscience,” I said. “That’s what he says. He confesses everything.”

“Yeah,” Tim shouts out, nodding his head vigorously. “He’s a psycho.”

I sneak another glance at Diane, her face almost greenish now, and a knot in her brow.

“Well, let’s look at what he says,” Ms. Cameron said. “Page sixty-two.”

A grunting whir of pages, spines cracking.

Ms. Cameron looked at Diane, who sat motionless, her spine curled.

“Open your book,” I whispered, nudging it.

Diane turned and looked at me, eyes glassy and black.

“Diane,” Ms. Cameron said, walking closer to us now, “how about you read Claudius’s soliloquy for us?”

Diane’s head lifted, then fell again. “I don’t…”

“Come on, Diane,” Ms. Cameron said, walking to Diane’s desk, rapping her knuckles on the laminate top. “Let’s hear the confession.”

“Ms. Cameron,” she whispered, “I…”

“Confess! Confess!” shouted Tim, playfully pounding his fist on his desk.

Diane’s head darted around, and the black look she gave him made him nearly jump back.

“I can do it,” I volunteered, a queasy feeling rising in me.

But Diane opened her book, her hands looking damp. Her familiar leather bookmark on the exact right page.

“O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven,” she read, her voice high and not her own. “It hath the primal eldest curse upon ’t.”

For a second, that voice quavering, I thought she might be about to cry. But Diane never cried. Her face white, and lips white too, like a vampire in a movie, she kept going.

“Diane,” Ms. Cameron started, “are you—”

But Diane talked right over her, her voice drowning her out, pitching suddenly loud and strong and throaty. Then she rose to her feet, as we were supposed to when we read, and all of us watched, heads twisting, craning, to see.

“What if this cursèd hand were thicker than itself with brother’s blood?” she read. “Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow?”

She read it all. Each word like a hard blow, and everything sounding so much darker and more dire on the page.

“But, O, what form of prayer can serve my turn?” Diane read. “‘Forgive me my foul murder’?”

Beneath the desk, her legs trembled, an ankle turned against itself. And that hand at her side, her fingers pushing together, pressing into her leg.

By the time she reached the end—“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below”—she wasn’t looking at the page at all and her face, tilted high, caught the light, eyes shut like a church-window angel: “Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

None of us knew what we were seeing and I was just as blank and dumb as all the rest.

That night was the night. Diane came over to study, Hamlet in hand, bookmark hanging like a dark tongue.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” I said. “You were so strange in class.”

She looked at me, her winter scarf bundled around her neck as she shivered in the doorway.

It felt like she saw a hunger in me, but there was a hunger in her too. I felt it.

“Kit, do you think I could sleep over?”

I said yes without even asking my mom.

As soon as we settled in my room, she called to get permission.

“Is it okay?” I asked when she hung up. I still hadn’t met her grandfather, but my mom said she’d heard from a nurse who volunteered at the rescue clinic that he was sick.

“He’s glad,” she said. “He worries I work too hard. He thinks we’re going to, I don’t know, do our nails and watch music videos.”

It wasn’t until then that she tugged off her gloves, unfurled her scarf, neck and hands ruddy and angry-looking. She turned to me, solemn and serious, and suggested we get started.

But she didn’t really seem to want to get started. She kept fanning the pages of the Signet Hamlet in her hand, as if looking for something she never found.

“Diane,” I finally said, “is this about what happened in class today?”

But she insisted nothing happened, except it was clear that it had, and was still happening because finally she looked at me and said, “Did you mean what you said in class today? About Claudius having no conscience?”

“Sure,” I said. “He kills his own blood to get what he wants. Which means he just has no morals.”

She looked down at the book, palm pressing the gloomy-faced man on the paperback cover.

I waited, and that was when it happened. A click of her jaw, like a pit bull’s or cobra’s unlocking, and she asked me, “Kit, do you think it could happen in real life?”

“What?” We were talking about Hamlet, except we weren’t.

“For someone to have no conscience.”

“Yes,” I said, quickly. Because I did. But also because it felt like she was going to tell me something, a secret. Diane’s secret at last (as if any of us had only one).

I remembered what she’d said that night after Barrelz and Bootz. All her talk about sex and scaring herself.

“Diane,” I said, “what is it?” I paused. “Did someone do something to you? Did someone hurt you?”

I would regret saying this, asking this, more than anything else in my whole cramped life.

Her head turned to the side; she glanced at me, showing me only the white of her left eye, gleaming like a pearl. Her hand wrapped about the locket, chain pressing against her neck.

The first thought that came to me was her dad. That phantom with the mustache, the dad-khakis. The awkward arm around his daughter’s tense shoulder. Everything that had seemed earnest and sad turned ugly. Molesting, or incest, an even uglier word. Is that why she never talked about him? Had he done something?

But she shook her head. “No one did anything to me. I’m talking about something I did. I’m talking about myself.”

There’s a churning in me, like there’s no going back now, but why had I pushed myself here in the first place?

“What did you do?” I said.

“I can’t say it out loud. I’ve never said it.”

“Did you dent your granddad’s truck?”

“No.”

I paused. “Are you pregnant?”

“No.” She looked at me and, voice even, said, “It’s so much worse.”

I didn’t say anything at all.

“I killed him,” she said. “I killed my dad.”