She seems like a nice girl. A lovely girl, like my mom said. Inside and out.

Over at my regular table, Table Dweeb, as we like to call it, Beaker catches my eye. She keeps looking worriedly from me to Sadie and back again, like she can’t believe this turn of events: me and the shoplifter. What the heck is going on? She may be forced to stage some kind of intervention. Next to her, El glances over and gives me a smile, which I don’t know how to interpret. I don’t know what to make of her smiling at me. Maybe now it’s easier for her to like me at a distance?

And then, of course, there’s Steven. He’s reading, his tall frame curled awkwardly in the metal cafeteria chair, his head bent over his book. He pushes his glasses up on his nose and drags his lower lip between his teeth, something he does when he’s thinking all the deep thoughts. He rests his forehead against his fist, then jots something down in the margins.

I love that he writes in books.

“Hey,” Sadie whispers to me urgently. “Here’s your chance.”

I look up at Sadie. “What?”

She jerks her head in Ashley’s direction.

I turn back. Sure enough, Ashley’s friends are getting up. They give their faint “see you at practice”s and “love you”s and then they’re gone. Ashley sits picking at her carrot slivers alone.

It’s like the universe is giving me this opportunity. If I believed in that sort of thing.

Ashley reaches into the backpack at her feet and pulls out a book: Persuasion, by Jane Austen.

Yes. She even freaking reads classic literature. This girl is too good to be true.

It’s time. I slide out the letter and stand up. All of a sudden my heart starts beating like a brass band. Whomp whomp whomp.

“You can do it,” Sadie whispers.

I can do it. I can take twenty steps across the cafeteria and hand a letter to a girl.

I can say: Hi, Ty left this for you. So . . . here.

And then I can give it to her and I can turn around and walk away.

So I won’t see her face when she reads it.

Or maybe she won’t read it here, with all these people around. Maybe she’ll go to the library and find that empty corner behind the stacks. That’s what I would do. Or maybe she’ll wait until she gets home.

And maybe I should be more discreet. We’re in the middle of a crowded cafeteria. People will notice. People will be listening.

I could say, Hi, can I talk to you? and lead her to that empty corner of the library, and give it to her there.

If she’d come with me.

But people would notice that too, and then they might ask her about it.

I could mail it to her.

But then maybe her mom would find the letter first, and read it, and maybe there’s sensitive information in there. Ty could have mailed it to her if he’d wanted that. Maybe her dad would read it and maybe she and Ty had sex and he wrote about that and it would ruin her relationship with her father forever.

All of this goes through my mind and more, more questions, more junk, more variables.

I’m ten steps in the right direction now. Ten to go.

Someone says Ashley’s name. She looks up from her book and lays it on the table and smiles blindingly, a happy, excited smile. She jumps up and throws herself into a guy’s arms.

Not just any guy, either. Grayson.

One of my brother’s friends.

“I was just thinking about you,” Ashley says.

They kiss. Not a long kiss, nothing passionate or showy or French, but a quick peck that says, We’re together. We kiss all the time, and it’s no big deal.

I’ve stopped walking. I’m standing there five steps away, watching them kiss. They pull back from each other and Grayson says something I don’t understand in his deep, rumbly-jock voice, and then he glances over Ashley’s shoulder right at me.

It’s clear that he recognizes me. His expression tightens into one part pity, one part I don’t know what, like the sight of me brings an unpleasant taste to his mouth. The same look on his face as when he and Fauxhawk brought that box to our house three days after my brother died, when the school gathered up all remaining evidence of Tyler James Riggs and delivered it to our front door.

They took Ty’s name off the roster. They even expunged his school records for the year, as if they could erase his existence altogether.

I’d bet good money they didn’t do that kind of thing with Hailey McKennett, who lost her battle with cystic fibrosis two years ago, or Sammie Sullivan, who died of complications from pneumonia, or Jacob Wright, who was killed in a car crash driving home drunk from a party at Branched Oak Lake last summer. Jacob got a tree planted for him at the front of the school, a plaque under it that I pass every day walking in that reads WE’LL MISS YOU, J. Sammie got a moment of silence during first period that year and an entire page of the yearbook devoted to her memory. They read Hailey’s name at graduation.

But Ty got his locker packed up and delivered promptly back to my mother, before we’d even had a chance to bury him.

Because it was suicide.

Because they don’t want to seem like they’re condoning it.

Ashley sees Grayson’s expression and turns to see what he’s looking at. She sees me standing there frozen. All at once a myriad of emotions pass over her face: confusion, pity, embarrassment over kissing Grayson, and, oh yes, there it is, an emotion I’m most familiar with these days, rising in her deep blue eyes.

Guilt.

I know guilt when I see it.