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Hed the subject?

"Well, I had taken to bringing a knife to school, not a switchblade or anything cool but a little two- inch blade on et this blade free and I get behind Billy and I slice hiht up his back, a shallow little cut up his spine It wasn’t deep but it got his attention and he fell over, thinking he was dead, blood all over the bench and the floor And I got on hi, the blade bouncing off bone in his forehead and blood and"

I thought long and hard about how to dress up this next part, but couldn’t think of a way I wondered when the doughnut shop was scheduled to open

Filling in the silence, Amy asked, "What did they do to you?"

"Let’s put it this way I’ll never, ever tell you"

She had no anshich either meant she was totally unfamiliar with the concept or very well fa out his eyes--

"--hurting hially blind I wound up getting charged with aggravated assault and several other things that are all synony a permanent expulsion My dad--my adoptive dad--he’s a lawyer, you know, he had a series of s with the school and the prosecutor and it was ame for et me off because the case could be made that the school should have protected Billy fronosed me, whatever I met with a counselor who had me talk about my mom and look at inkblots and role- play with puppets and draw a picture of how I viewed my place in the world

and I kneas a sca his back, again and again and I figured, hey, screw theuy, didn’t want to push the charges He said it was a five- on- one fight and shit happens, didn’t want to see me disappear into the jaws of the juvie justice system The school backed off on the expulsion under threat of lawsuit and, bada- boo my final year at Pine View"

A speck of crystal landed on the windshield A lone snowflake Another landed a few inches away

"So," I said, "four ood-bye to sports and driving and independence and knohat his food looks like before he eats it and never knowing if a fly has landed in his soup He takes all of his pain pills at once Demerol, I think They find him dead the next day"

Silence Desperate to hear her say so, I asked, "So how much of that story did you already know?"

"Most of it There was a weird rumor that went around that you had snuck into his roo stupid like that, with rat poison or so, which was stupid because the police would have noticed that"

"Right, right"

I started that rumor, by the way

"You must have felt horrible when you found out About Billy, I mean That’d be awful"

"Yeah"