Can you imagine what it might feel like for someone to confess a murder to you? What it means to hear it, to know it, to carry it with you? You have been made an involuntary accomplice. Accessory after the fact. What would you do? Go to the police? Urge repentance? Offer words of understanding? Pray?

Or would you run?

At first, all I could do was hide. I skipped AP Chem, which pained me, so close to news about the Severin scholarship. But even avoiding my locker, our shared classes, I couldn’t escape her. She knew my beats. Finally, she found me in the library, on the floor behind the tall stacks, curled over my overheated, sticky-keyed laptop.

She found me anyway.

I saw her feet first as she prowled the stacks like the monster in a movie. Those black flats, shiny as soldier boots.

“Kit,” she said. “I don’t understand.”

I told her I couldn’t see her. I didn’t ever want to see her again.

“But the AP exam is coming,” she said, kneeling down next to me. “We need to study.”

“Diane, we’re not study partners anymore,” I said. I just said it. “We’re not anything anymore.”

She looked at me, a notch of pain over her brow. It was as if she’d had her first one-night stand without knowing it. She’d shared something with me, something as intimate as if she’d let me between those long, locked legs of hers, and now I was pulling away.

“Oh,” she said, nodding almost to herself. Rising slowly, brushing the dust off her knees. Then adding, softly, “I ruined everything.”

Watching her walk away, wending through the stacks like a pale ghost, I felt something awful inside, even if I couldn’t name it.

That night, I dreamed of Mr. Fleming. His weekend khakis and his funny mustache like a bristle brush. In the dream he was on a gurney, his heart swollen to five times its size. And Diane in her long gored skirt, staring as he thumped his own hands over his heart like his hands were paddles. Like he could will himself back to life.

I dreamed of my own dad calling me, his voice pained and throbbing through the phone. Like the phone itself was quivering with it. There’s a girl here, he said. She says she’s your friend. She says she has something to give me…

And I dreamed of Diane coming into my house at night, sneaking down the shag carpet of the hallway. Dreamed of waking up to her white face above me.

Isn’t this what you wanted? the dream Diane asked me, as if just noticing me there in her dad’s apartment, her dad dying on the floor.

Was it what I wanted? Didn’t I crave all her secrets, plucking the heart of her mystery?

I wanted to know her secrets, but I didn’t want them to be this.

Why did you tell me? I asked, and it sounded like a whimper, and I wasn’t even sure if I was awake or asleep. Now it’s part of me too.

That’s how it felt, like a tumor lashed to my insides.

I’m sorry, she said, crying softly but smiling too. You told me your secret. I wanted to tell you mine.

In the morning, I told my mom I was sick, the sickest I’d ever been. Maybe I was dying. Something inside me, cramps like an animal crawling inside my ovaries.

She let me stay home for three days. I didn’t shower or brush my teeth, a mouthful of fur. Finally, the third morning, she dragged me into the shower stall, scrubbed me down like one of her mangy rescue mutts.

“Tomorrow you go back,” she told me.

After she left, I tried to study, but the words kept turning into pictures and I kept falling asleep on the afghan or having dark, semi-awake thoughts.

At one point, I guess I started moaning. It got so loud I frightened myself.

I had to get out, go somewhere. My hair full of dried shampoo and my legs hairy, like the down on a baby pig; what did I care?

I looped the collars on Grimm and Fudge, even though it was sure to rain, the sky so heavy it seemed nearly to touch my back. We walked all the way to the highway before it started, slow splotches, warm and thick. Grimm never wavered, the thick hunks of fur on his back glistening, but Fudge yanked free and ran straight for the nearest overhang, the old arcade where my dad once broke his hand playing air hockey.

“Is that Scott’s cuz?” a voice came. A tall guy in a Klassic Pinballz T-shirt unloading warm crates of Faygo in the alley.

“Yep,” I said, thinking how the rain made my tank top pucker from my chest and what he might see.

“The smart one, right?” he said, petting Fudge with his enormous long-fingered hand. “Wanna have some beers?”

I did, taking a fat little pony of Miller High Life.

He said his name was Lou and he used to play drums for Scott’s sometime-band. He’d been delivering slick cans and Slim Jims and vending-machine condoms all day with his friend Jimmy, the friendly fella sitting on the upturned trash can, and wouldn’t it be fun to sit in the back on these empty kegs and have a few?

So we did. Lou turned the radio up on his truck, bass-thick grooves and old metal. And we all took turns throwing an old tennis ball to Fudge, and Jimmy showed me the hard white pads on his thumbs from his decade of pinball devotionals. At some point, Jimmy’s girlfriend appeared and danced alongside the back fence, doing whirling snake-charmer things with her long dark arms that ended in sharp manicured points studded with blue crystals.

Soon, I was dancing with her, and we were talking of getting our tongues pierced with the piercing kit she’d bought earlier that day from a place called HottyBodyJewlz. Her fingers on my face, she told me I had the prettiest eyes she’d ever seen and kissed me flush on the mouth.

Watching us, Lou and Jimmy kicked the kegs with their sneakers and cheered and hooted as Grimm let out a howl and Fudge was somewhere by the trash cans, licking up foam in long, snaky gulps. And then the piercing kit got torn open and Jimmy brought the needle close to me, Lou holding a cork and dirty cubes from the ice machine. Punching both our tongues and the blood filling our mouths with metal and grit. We couldn’t get enough.

The dark swallowed the sky and someone brought over chicken on a stick from the Chevron and I had long since stopped drinking but the pony bottles became a magnificent monument in Jimmy’s hands, an objet, his girlfriend kept saying, and she studied art at City Tech, which is how she could see that my eyes were so beautiful that Lou better kiss me before she beat him to it again.

And he did. Lou.

Lou kissed me, his big hands folding around my face, my blood-thick chin. My tongue numb and bold and the strangest kissing I’d ever had or ever would have. Sticky dust on his fingertips, and a whisper in my ear that said, You, you, smart girl, look at you. Look at you go.

Oh, it was the warmest place to be.

“I’d like to know, little girl,” my mom said when I stalked in at two a.m., my shorts on backward and both dogs shuddering from rain and beer and rain again. A scatter of bottle glass in Grimm’s mane from when the monument fell.

The boy Lou had wanted to drive me, but I’d scuttled away crabwise when no one was looking, when Jimmy and his girl were trying to find a broom, or maybe some cigarettes, and Lou was trying to start his car, an angry grinding, and his belt buckle still loose from what we’d been up to.

The walk home had been spooky, and once I thought I’d seen Grandpa Fleming’s truck, Diane’s halo of hair as she sat behind the wheel, her eyes darting for me.

What would she want from me?

Everything.

“I’d like to know,” my mom kept saying, “where you got the idea you could behave like this.”

“I love our dogs,” I said, still drunk. “I’m sorry.”

That’s when I started crying, which upset my poor mom a lot. She rubbed me and Grimm and Fudge with rough towels until our skin burned to dry us and clean off all the sooty rain.

She made me drink four Tupperware cups full of water, which is the worst way to drink water unless you like plastic. Then, trying to get my jellies off my blackened feet, I finally said it. Finally asked it.

Nothing could have stopped the words from stumbling perilously from my waterlogged mouth.

“Mom,” I said, “what if you had this friend who told you something they’d done. Something really bad. It’s so bad, Mom.”

She looked at me, dipping a dishrag into a tub of Vaseline, working out a piece of tar caught in Fudge’s paw pads. “What did you do, Katherine Ann?”

“Nothing. It’s a friend.”

“Katherine Ann, you need to tell me,” she said, motionless, Fudge’s paw pads curled in her palm. “Just tell me what you did.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “I know about someone who did, and it’s bad. Am I supposed to tell someone?”

She wouldn’t quite look in me in the eye. I knew she had to guess it was Diane. I knew she’d had a feeling about Diane.

“It depends,” she said. “Would telling make it better?”

I didn’t say anything for a second, my eyes on Fudge. His eyes looked fearful, his paws clamped between my mother’s red fingers.

“I don’t know if it would make it better, but Mom”—I looked at her—“it’s so heavy.”

As I said the word, I felt my voice go high. Don’t start crying again, I thought, you’ll scare her.

She set the dishrag down. “Is someone in trouble or in some kind of danger?”

“No.”

“Is someone going to get hurt if you don’t tell?”

I thought for a second. “No. But someone will if I do tell.”

“Then don’t,” she said, grabbing for the dishrag again, Fudge squeaking. “Everybody screws up. And everyone has their reasons.”

“I guess,” I said.

“You’re a good friend, honey,” she said, stroking Fudge’s puny body, her fingers slick with the Vaseline, her face tired. “And if she needs your help to make it right, you’ll give it.”

“Okay.”

“Kit, you can’t fix other people’s problems,” she said, slapping the dishrag on the table, Fudge yelping desolately, shaking under my hand. “You can’t fix other people.”