“Adam,” supplies Wendy, homework buddy extraordinaire, looking down at me from her perch on my bed. “See where it says, So spake the Arch-Angel Michael, then paused, / as at the world’s great period; and our sire, / replete with joy and wonder, thus replied. So now it’s Adam speaking. He’s our sire, get it? I love that line, ‘as at the world’s great period.’”

“Ugh! What does that even mean?”

“Well, Michael was telling him about redemption, about how good is going to triumph over evil in the end, all that stuff.”

“So now he’s okay with it? He’s going to get thrown out of Eden but everything’s great because someday, thousands of years after he dies, the side of good is going to win out?”

“Clara, I think you’re taking this a tad too seriously. It’s only a poem. It’s art. It’s supposed to make you think, is all.”

“Well, right now it’s making me think that my physics homework looks really super fun and I should get to it.” I close the offending book and slide it away from me.

“But Mr. Phibbs said you had to turn in that rewrite tomorrow. No more dragging your feet, he said.”

“Yep, and I’m probably going to get a D on that paper too, whether I study or not. I swear, he’s trying to torture me.”

Wendy looks concerned. “It will probably be on the AP test.”

I sigh. “I don’t want to think about the AP test. Or college. Or my stupendously bright future. I want to live in the now, I’ve decided.”

She closes her book and looks at me with this ultra let’s-be-serious expression.

“You should be excited, Clara. You applied to all these awesome schools. You have a great chance at getting in to at least one of them. Not everybody has that.”

She’s nervous. Our acceptance letters should be coming this week. She’s already gone to the post office like three times since Monday.

“Okay, okay, color me excited,” I say to placate her. “Woo-hoo! So. Excited.”

She gets out her chemistry book, apparently done talking. I open up my physics book. We study. Suddenly she sighs.

“It’s just . . . Tucker’s the same way,” she says. “My parents kept trying to talk him into college, but he wasn’t even a little bit interested. He didn’t apply to a single school. Not even University of Wyoming, as a backup.”

“He wants to stay here,” I say.

“Do you?” Wendy asks.

“Do I what?”

“Do you want to stay here? Because Tucker does? Because I think that’s romantic and everything, Clara, but don’t—” She stops, tugs at the end of her braid in an agitated way, trying to decide if she’s going to go ahead and say this to me. “Don’t give up your life for a guy,” she says then firmly. “Not even a great guy. Not even Tucker.”

I don’t know what to say. “Wendy—”

“I’m going to break up with Jason,” she adds. “And I like him. A lot. But when it’s time to leave for school, I’ll have to cut him loose.”

“He’s not a fish, Wen,” I point out. “What if Jason doesn’t want to be cut loose? What if he wants to try the long-distance thing?”

She shakes her head. “He’ll be in Boston, or New York, or one of those fancy schools he applied to. I’ll be in Washington, hopefully. It wouldn’t work. But that’s being a grown-up. You have to think about the future.”

I want to remind her that we’re not grown-ups yet, we’re only seventeen. We shouldn’t have to think about the future. Besides, my future, the one I see almost every night when I close my eyes, is a cemetery. An incredible, staggering loss. What happens after that, my life after that day, is like a videotape that’s been deleted: gray and static. Yes, I will probably go to college. I might make new friends, go to parties, and end up thinking that life is okay. But right now I’m trapped inside a single sunny day on a hillside.

“Are you okay?” Wendy asks. “I’m sorry. I don’t have the right to lecture you. I know you’re having a hard time, what with your mom and everything.”

“It’s okay,” I try to reassure her, shake the bad feelings off, ignore the pity I’m starting to feel from her.

“Hey, I have an idea,” I say to change the subject. “Let’s go check the post office.”

“It’s different than what I thought it would be,” Wendy says as we walk along the boardwalk in downtown Jackson.

I hold the door open for her as we duck into the post office. “What is?”

“You and Tucker. I thought you were so perfect for each other, you’d balance each other out, your yin to his yang, something like that, and I thought he’d be so happy all the time, but—” She chews on her bottom lip for a minute. “Sometimes you’re so intense, so focused on each other that you don’t even seem to notice anything else. Like, um, me.”

“Sorry, Wendy,” I say. “You’re still my bestie, you know that, right?”

“Darn straight,” she says. “But boyfriend trumps best friend, is all I’m saying. Although I guess I’m guilty of that too.”

She’s right. I haven’t seen nearly as much of Wendy this year, partially because, when I have free time, I tend to spend it with Tucker or at Angel Club and partially because Wendy is with Jason a lot. That’s to be expected, like she said; when a girl gets a boyfriend she doesn’t spend as much time with her girlfriends. I always thought that was dumb, but that didn’t stop us from doing it when it happened. I also hang out less with Wendy because there’s a lot that she doesn’t know now, that she can’t know, and I’d rather stay away than constantly lie to her. Last year I could pretend, at least most of the time, that I was normal. This year I can’t.

We separate to check our mailboxes. In ours is the usual junk, bills, grocery store ads, but then, at the bottom, a fat envelope. I swallow hard. Stanford University.

Wendy appears by my side, her face white under her tan, blue eyes wide. She holds up an envelope. WSU. This is it. Her dream school. Her future. Her life. She tries to smile but it comes out as more of a wince. Her eyes drop to the envelope in my hand, and she gasps.

“Should we . . . wait until we get home?” she asks, her voice almost a squeak.

“No. Definitely not. Let’s open them. Get it over with.”

She doesn’t have to be told twice. She tears right into her envelope, takes one look at the top page, then presses her hand over her mouth. “Oh,” she says.

“What? What? You got in, right?”

There’s a shimmer of tears in her eyes. “There is a God,” she says. “I got in!”

We hug and jump around and squeal like little girls for a few minutes, then settle down.

“Now you,” she says.

I open it carefully. Pull the papers out. A brochure for the on-campus housing drops out, floats down to the floor. Wendy and I stare at it.

“Clara,” she breathes. “You got in too.”

I read the first line of the first page—Dear Clara, we are pleased to inform you—then try to work up a smile that matches Wendy’s, although what’s moving through my head in this moment is something different than excitement, something different from elation or happiness, like a combination of incredulity and dread. But this is a good thing, I tell myself. I could go home to California. I could actually attend Stanford University, and study anything I want, and build a new life for myself.

“I got in,” I whisper in disbelief.

Wendy’s arm comes around my shoulders. “This is amazing,” she says. “And trust me. Tucker’s going to be so happy for you.”

“So that’s it,” Angela says matter-of-factly later when I show up for Angel Club. “You’re going.”

“Not necessarily.” I’m back to my usual position on the stage at the Pink Garter, back to glory practice, because that’s all I can think to do in the dreamy sort of daze I’ve been in since this afternoon.

Angela puts down her pen and gives me her best you-absolute-moron stare. “Clara Gardner. You got accepted to Stanford. You got a scholarship, even. Don’t tell me you’re not going.”