A hand comes down on my shoulder.

Beaker. She meets my eyes and sees the panic, and her jaw sets determinedly. She whirls around.

“Hey, give us some room here,” she says in a loud voice. “Let us by, please. Excuse me.”

She weaves me through the crowd. Then we’re outside. I sit down on the curb near the hearse and try to catch my breath. Beaker stands over me like she’s keeping guard.

I’ve never been so glad to see Beaker. I could almost cry, I’m so glad.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

“Not really.”

“Do you want something to drink? I think there’s lemonade in there. It’s the foul powdered stuff, but it’s cold and it’s liquid.”

“No, thanks.”

She drops down beside me and leans back, stretching her legs out in front of her. She’s wearing a gray wool skirt and stripy socks. Only Beaker would wear striped socks to a funeral.

“Well,” she says after a minute. “That was like the worst thing ever.”

I’ve missed Beaker.

“Where is El?” I ask.

“El doesn’t do funerals.”

“She was at Ty’s,” I point out.

Beaker looks at me gravely. “Yes. She went to Ty’s. I thought I was going to have to get her a paper bag to breathe into—she almost lost it like ten times. Something about how she threw up at her great-aunt’s funeral when she was seven.”

“Oh.” I feel dumb that I didn’t know any of that. I wasn’t paying attention to my friends at Ty’s funeral. Apparently I assumed the world revolved around me and my pain. “If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have asked her to—”

“She would have come anyway.” Beaker yanks a blade of old brown grass out of the lawn and twists it around her finger. “She’s your friend. She loves you. She wanted to be there for you. We both did.”

“Thanks.”

“We’re still your friends, you know, El and me. And Steven, even though he can’t really look at you without turning into a sad country love song.”

“I know.” I don’t know what else to say. I know.

A shadow falls over us. It’s Mom. She looks pale.

“Hello, Jill,” she says faintly.

“Hello, Mama Riggs,” Jill responds—the name my friends always called my mother, like they were claiming her as their mother, too.

Normally Mom would make small talk in a situation like this, but I can tell she’s exhausted. “Are you ready to head home?” she asks me.

I jump up. “Yes.”

“I’ll see you in the funny papers,” Jill says as we walk away, her signature closing line.

Yeah, I think. Hopefully I’ll see you there.

At home, Mom goes straight into her bedroom and closes the door.

I watch TV in the downstairs den. It’s a risk, hanging out so close to Ty’s room. One never knows when something mind-bending might happen there. But I need something to occupy my brain.

There’s no sign of Ty, thankfully. No Brut. No reflections. No shadows.

For once, I feel completely alone.

I channel surf with the TV muted for a while, so I don’t disturb Mom. I watch TMZ, which is pretty self-explanatory without the sound, and an episode of Cops. Then I land on the six o’clock news. I can tell instantly by the background that the story is about Patrick Murphy. The reporter is standing in the train yard. She’s young and pretty, with that white-blond hair that almost looks silver in the sunshine, but her eyes are reluctant, like this isn’t the kind of story she wants to be reporting on.

I turn up the sound.

“. . . the second death in this small town this year, and the seventeenth teen suicide in the state of Nebraska in the last twelve months. As the community of Raymond gathers together today to mourn the loss of one of its brightest young stars, they are left with some haunting questions: What happened to this fun-loving, straight-A student and swim-team state champion to make him throw away the bright future that was ahead of him? What led him to this empty train yard? And how could this senseless tragedy have been prevented?”

I hear Mom stirring upstairs and mute the television again. As the reporter wraps up the story, they run a stock photo of Wyuka Cemetery, zooming in on a stone angel gazing stoically at the ground. I see an internet address, www.youthsuicideprevention.nebraska.edu, scroll across the bottom of the screen. Then Patrick’s face.

Then the weather.

My heart is beating fast. My fists are clenched, my jaw tight. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the story. I shouldn’t get so worked up about it. But the weight of the day is crushing me.

Seventeen teen suicides. Seventeen.

I’ve flipped through Mom’s books. I know that seventeen is not so many, when you consider that more than thirty thousand people die from suicide in the U.S. every year, the tenth leading cause of death, the third leading cause among teens. I could spout statistics, warning signs we should have heeded, factors that put Ty at risk. He lived in a house where there were guns present, which made him 5.4 times more likely to die by suicide. He came from what would be classified as a “broken home,” which made him three times more likely. He was male, which made him five times more likely, since females attempt suicide more often, but males actually succeed at it with more consistency. Ty had recently suffered a breakup or a broken heart, or whatever did happen with Ashley. His grades had been sliding. He’d been up and down. He’d been depressed. He’d tried it once before.