Chapter One: Ollie

THE TROUBLE ALL STARTED WHEN I MADE THE mistake of letting Francine Zhang see me cry.

It was two weeks ago, during fifth period AP US History, and we were all sitting in the dark. Mr. Romero was showing The Deer Hunter, which is the kind of movie you should really warn a guy about before springing it on him, especially right before lunch. If you haven’t seen it, The Deer Hunter is about a group of American friends who go off to fight in the Vietnam War, where they’re taken prisoner and forced by their captors to play Russian roulette. Some of them survive, but the violence of it—the pointlessness of it, really—horrified me, especially when I thought about how people in my family were among those caught in the shitshow off-screen, getting bombed out by the Americans.

What really got me, though, wasn’t the gore or the carnage but the coming home after it. That sense of never being able to go back to whatever you were before. Something about that depressed the hell out of me, making my stomach twist up into my throat and, yes, goddamn it, forcing me to tear up.

I don’t know what the hell was wrong with me that day. I mean, I’m not saying I have a problem with crying necessarily, but it’s not something I really want to be doing in front of everybody. Still, the situation could’ve been totally fine, given how the lights were all out. I would’ve gotten away with it, easy—if it weren’t for Francine.

There I was, about to wipe my eyes with the back of my jacket sleeve, when she somehow dropped her eraser, a rounded piece of rubber made to look like a California roll, and it came tumbling back toward my sneaker. She turned around to check where it went, and that’s when she saw me.

For a second, neither of us moved. She blinked, her stare blank and penetrating at the same time. A sliver of afternoon light escaped from beneath the drawn shades behind us and cut across her nose. Her eyes were completely dry.

I leaned over in a hurry to retrieve her goddamn eraser, but really it was so I could swipe my arm over my face to hide the fact that I’d been low-key bawling. I handed the sushi roll to her without making eye contact, and she accepted it wordlessly before swiveling back around, the end credits filling the projector screen and the weird space that suddenly swelled around us.

I figured that would be it, that we’d go back to barely acknowledging each other, despite the fact that I’d sat behind her for months and recently noticed that her hair, stick straight and cut off at the shoulder, smelled kind of nice, like the tea tree oil shampoo I use on my dog, Dexter.

Francine, however, was sitting very still in her seat, as if contemplating something—and then, in an abrupt about-face, she reached into her backpack and produced a travel-size packet of tissues.

Which, to my utter mortification, she offered to me.

Desperate to avoid calling more attention to this sorry situation, I did the first thing that came to mind—I took a tissue. Anything to speed up this interaction, I reasoned. Anything.

But as I silently blew my nose, watching Francine refasten the flap over the tissue packet and squirrel it back into her bag, I allowed that she was just trying—in her well-meaning but unnecessary way—to be helpful. When she darted a last glance at me before facing frontward again, I think I must have given her one of those throwaway smiles, the kind that isn’t supposed to mean anything to normal people.

The kind that, unfortunately, did mean something to Francine.

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