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kind of an emergency.”
    We started walking. “What happened?” I’d said.
    “The Senior Leaders made me eat Skittles,” Noe said. “You know they’re made out of boiled horse hooves, right? I told them I was vegetarian, and they didn’t care.”
    Her distress was palpable. We hurried into the school building and I held Noe’s hair as she threw up the detested substance.
    “You understand ,” Noe had said. “My best friend at my old school was all, ‘Oh my God, you’re bulimic,’ and I’m like, ‘Bulimics eat an entire chocolate cake and puke it up. I’m justtrying to get this dead animal out of my body, if that’s okay with you.’”
    I’d felt a wave of protectiveness toward her, this vulnerable girl with oily black hair who the Senior Leaders had force-fed horse hooves. A wave of pride, too: I was not the shrill, childish friend of eighth grade. I was the one who understood .
    I could be the friend who understood. It was better than being a monster. I had known Noe for only ten minutes, but already I could feel that protecting her would give me a purpose, give my tortured energy somewhere to go.
    I had hardly spoken all day—all summer, it felt like—but walking next to Noe, words started spilling out of me. It was as if the cold hand that had sealed me off from the rest of humankind had left one airhole open, the airhole of Noe. I found to my surprise that I could breathe again, and laugh. The effect diminished when she paused to talk to teachers, and came back again when we walked on. I observed it with fascination, this loophole in my otherwise complete suffocation. I could be a normal human, as long as I was interacting with Noe.
    Noe wanted to know where I lived, and which school I had gone to before E. O. James, and if I had heard that Ms. Kravenko was the hardest for math, and if I wanted to sign up for gymnastics with her because I looked like I would be good at it. She told me all about her old boyfriend, Sean, and asummer camp with a weird name where she was going to be a junior counselor the next year.
    By the time we’d settled into our auditorium seats to hear the motivational speaker, I was completely devoted to her.
    With Noe beside me, I never got lost in the halls anymore. I stopped worrying about Louis Vallero. I kept her always in my field of vision, a guiding star.
    “You found a friend,” Mom said. “That’s wonderful.”
    I peeled the pepperoni off the pizza we were sharing and stacked it dutifully on the edge of my plate.

7
    ONE OF THE HAPPYFUN ASPECTS OF the first day of school this year was that the Senior Leaders spent the whole day pelting people with candy.
    There was candy in the halls and candy in the bathroom sinks and candy in the cracks between the auditorium seats. Someone threw a Tootsie Roll at the motivational speaker, causing Mr. Beek to hand out the first suspension of the year.
    By two p.m., the school was filled with weightless wrappers that floated around the halls like shiny ghosts.
    “This is appalling,” Noe said as we walked through an entire hallway full of Reese’s Pieces that made ricketycrunching sounds underfoot.
    Steven crouched and scooped up a handful. Noe slapped at his hand, but he got it to his mouth and crammed the candy in.
    “Some would call it delicious,” he said.

8
    WHEN I GOT HOME FROM SCHOOL, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table sorting through a pile of mail. She was still in her uniform, her brown hair pulled into a ponytail, her feet still laced into the Converse sneakers that made her look even younger than she was.
    “Hey, Annabean,” she called when I walked in. “Have a sandwich. I brought home a whole tray.”
    Mom works the checkout at No Frills. One frill of working at No Frills is employees get to take home the premade deli sandwiches at the end of the day. They come wrapped in stretchy plastic with a capital letter slashed on in permanent marker. T for turkey, H for ham, R for roast beef, V for veggie.I