“This is Monday morning, May the eighth, and you will be taking the AP Chemistry exam. You may now remove the shrink-wrap from your exam packet and take out the section one booklet, but do not open the booklet or the shrink-wrapped section two materials. Put the white seals aside…”

The gym, waxed and silent, high windows streaked with dirt, and it was like we were all afraid to speak, to move, to turn our heads.

The proctor, a man with short furred arms and a thick wristwatch, spoke from a script and examined all our calculators.

Diane’s hair was shining. She didn’t turn around, but I noticed an odd odor from her. Something earthy, even animal.

“Now you may open section one and begin.”

The page was momentarily mysterious and then, in a flash, completely familiar. My pencil felt hot under my fingers and then began moving. And once it started, it never stopped.

There was nothing but a roar, and then a blur.

Everything else—the room, the teacher, the pressure, the way my left sock was sinking into my sneaker, the grunt and sputter from a tree-removal truck idling in the parking lot outside—disappeared.

Because, immediately and then ever after, my mind was doing things. Like up there in my head, I was pushing through overgrowth and far reaches of cheatgrass and hoary knapweed, and those reaches stretched themselves to points and the points became spears, and the spears were in my hands, and nothing could stop me.

Something had happened. Something was firing inside me now, and nothing could stop me.

Ever since Diane had told me, I’d been lost, a lost soul floating, but suddenly I felt myself again. In an instant, I was back and I didn’t need her. I didn’t need her gentle nudges, her shining example, to fire my ambitions. Maybe, I told myself, I never needed her at all.

After I finished the exam, long before anyone else—three hours, which was three minutes, so much blasting through my brain—I walked straight into the girls’ room and banged my fists on the sink so hard I split two nails, tearing one loose, a tender pucker slick with blood.

“Goddamn, goddamn,” I said under my breath, then louder, then louder, the echo making me feel godlike. “I killed it. I killed that motherfucker.” Like my old man used to say whenever he hit his number, waving his five-dollar scratch-off.

Running down the near-empty hallway, running to get outside and kick my legs and run and run and run.

I know things, I know everything. I’m smarter than anyone ever thought I could be. Even with my dad’s swiney genes mingling with my mom’s kindly ones, from that briny stew of cunning and weakness, I have something important inside me.

Something extraordinary.

When Diane called out after me—Kit, wait, Kit—her voice wobbly and plaintive down the long, empty corridor, I didn’t turn my head.

That night, my mom made brownies with Kahlua, and we danced to her dad’s scratchy Waylon Jennings albums.

It was only very late, coming down at last, the propulsive, fist-pumping, masculine thrust of the day collapsing in on itself as I crawled into bed, that bed, the bed of the blood confession, that I started to feel it all come back on me.

Staring at my split-nail finger, the flesh laid bare like a little baby’s tender skin, the spot where the cord stump finally fell free, I thought, I am not afraid of this, or her.

And: I never needed her anyway.

Then my mom in the doorway today, holding a check in her hand, waving it.

“Will wonders never cease,” she said. “Your dad sent you twenty-five bucks for high-school graduation.”

“Cash it fast,” I said, sitting up. “Cash it today.”

The next few weeks, the lurch and panic of final exams, graduation, the acceptance from State. Yes, State would allow me into its ranks, but without funding, it was just a piece of fancy bond paper, a taunt. I still hadn’t heard the official decision from the Severin scholarship people, but it seemed impossible. It was Diane’s to lose.

“Don’t worry about that,” my mom kept saying. “City Tech is so happy to have you. You can live here as long as you want. Maybe I could get you a job at the clinic. No more smelling like chicken fat.”

Thinking then of all the things my mother sometimes smelled like, wet dog or hot cat or far worse, those smells she scrubbed so hard to remove they made her hands look like raw hamburger.

“You don’t know until you know,” Ms. Castro kept saying every time I passed the guidance-counseling office, eyes on the Severin scholarship flyer.

But I did know.

Because there was Diane lurking under the dark scrim, Diane’s voice in my ear, a worm wriggling. I’m taking your scholarship, and leaving you with this.

Because whenever I paused a moment, whenever I let my imagination overtake me, Diane’s confession would reappear, sitting on my chest like a succubus.

In the morning, running, I’d sometimes imagine her chasing me through a thick forest, all the trees with big fat veins blackened from soot, from untold things. Behind me, I could always hear Diane.

The miles-long strides of those colt legs of hers, the slow breathing whirling through my ears. There was no way she would not catch up.

We were matched runners, and she had a will as iron-soldered as her heart.

Her blood ran cold and merciless.

The girl who could do anything.

Who had a rage in her like a bomb in her chest.

Those breaths on my neck now, I readied myself for anything, her arm, a scythe, her perfect doll teeth.

Small but sharp, they’d never stop tearing.