Chapter 18

"Well, your assumption that she killed herself because you broke up with her. I don't think that's why she killed herself at all. She killed herself because she was sick. You had nothing to do with making her that way. Your breaking up with her may have acted as a sort of catalyst for her final breakdown, but it could just have easily been some other crisis in her life – her parents getting divorced, her not making the cheerleader squad, her cat dying. Anything. So try not to be so hard on yourself." We were at the door to my classroom – geometry, I think it was, with Sister Mary Catherine. I turned to him and took my coat back. "Well, this is my stop. Thanks for the lift."

He held onto one sleeve of my coat. "Hey," he said, looking down at me. It was hard to see his eyes – it was pretty dark beneath the breezeway, shadowed as it was from the sun. But I remembered from when we'd fallen down together that his eyes were blue. A really nice blue. "Hey, listen," he said. "Let me take you out tonight. To thank you for saving my life, and everything."

"Thanks," I said, giving my coat a tug. "But I already have plans." I didn't add that my plans involved him in a most intimate manner.

"Tomorrow night, then," he said, still not relinquishing my coat.

"Look," I said. "I'm not allowed to go out on school nights."

This was patently untrue. Except for the fact that the police have brought me home a few times, my mother trusted me implicitly. If I wanted to go out with a boy on a school night, she'd have let me. The thing is, the subject had never really come up, no boy ever having offered to take me out, on a school night or any other for that matter.

Not that I'm a dog, or anything. I mean, I'm no Cindy Crawford, but I'm not exactly busted, either. I guess the truth of the matter is, I was always considered something of a weirdo in my old school. Girls who spend a lot of time talking to themselves and getting in trouble with the police generally are.

Don't get me wrong. Occasionally new guys would show up at school, and they'd express some interest in me … but only until someone who knew me filled them in. Then they'd avoid me like I had the plague, or something.

East Coast boys. What did they know?

But now I had a chance to start all over, with a new population of boys who had no idea about my past – well, except for Sleepy and Dopey, and I doubted they would tell since neither of them are what you'd call … well, verbal.

Neither of them had evidently gotten to Bryce, anyway, since the next words out of his mouth were, "This weekend, then. What are you doing Saturday night?"

I wasn't sure it was such a good idea to get involved with a guy whose dead girlfriend was trying to kill him. I mean, what if she found out and resented me for it? I was sure Father Dominic wouldn't think it was very cool, me going out with Bryce.

Then again, how often did a girl like me get asked out by a totally hot guy like Bryce Martinson?

"Okay," I said. "Saturday it is. Pick me up at seven?"

He grinned. He had very nice teeth, white and even. "Seven," he said, letting go of my coat. "See you then. If not before."

"See you then." I stood with my hand on the door to Sister Mary Catherine's geometry class. "Oh, and Bryce."

He had started down the breezeway, toward his own classroom. "Yeah?"

"Watch your back."

I think he winked at me, but it was kind of hard to tell in the shade.