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that?”
    Why did I say that? Why did I say that I was killed? What kind of a slip was that? Did I really wish that I had been killed alongside Will?
    No.
    Of course not.
    “Someone else was killed, Teresa,” I said, steadying my voice, finally starting to breathe normally. “A guy. I mean, my boyfriend. His name was Will. My high school boyfriend. What a weird slip. I guess seeing the dead deer—”
    “You know, there are a million deer in the Hamptons,” Teresa said softly. “They’re everywhere. And they’re always getting hit by cars.”
    “Yes?” I didn’t quite get her point.
    “You were talking about feeling like a frightened deer. And then the bus hit a deer. But what I’m saying is, it happens all the time. It was not an omen, Ellie. It was just a coincidence.”
    I gazed out the window. The sun faded behind a cloud. Darkness rolled over the bus. “Yeah,” I whispered. “Of course. Just a coincidence . . .”

6
    W ill’s house was always neat and spotless. The floors sparkled. You could see your reflection. Everything clean and dusted and in its place.
    I felt so intimidated whenever I stepped into his house. I always took my Doc Martens off at the door and walked in stocking feet. I knew Mrs. Davis, Will’s mother, didn’t approve of me. For one thing, I had crazy, purple-streaked hair, and I just let it flow wild and unbrushed behind my shoulders. And I dressed in baggy, loose-fitting outfits like everyone else at Menota North High.
    Maybe it was just me. But I always felt that Will’s mom was staring at me, watching what I touched, waiting for me to leave so she could wipe my fingerprints off the furniture.
    I’m not making this up. I once saw her eat a Popsicle with a fork and knife. Who the hell does that?
    It was a February afternoon. The temperature about two hundred below in Madison, not counting the windchill and the stiff gusts off the lake. Snow blowing and shifting in the wind, drifts to my knees.
    Will led me to his house after school. I had a hooded sweatshirt under my parka and two sweaters under that, and I was still shivering, too frozen to speak.
    He gives me a quick, frozen-lipped kiss. He thinks it’s funny. Two polar bears bumping noses.
    And then we’re inside his house, shoving the kitchen door closed behind us. My boots are dripping on the glowing kitchen linoleum—tough break, Mrs. Davis!—and I toss my wet parka down and start rubbing my arms, furiously rubbing the cold away.
    Will puts on the kettle for instant coffee.
    His mother is at work, and his sister is in an after-school program. So Will and I have the house to ourselves for a few hours in the afternoons.
    We sometimes hurry up to his bathroom on the second floor where we open the window, no matter how cold it is outside. And we smoke pot. Yes, Mrs. Davis, the world is not a neat place. You cannot keep control of everything—not even your family—by keeping everything neat and clean.
    It just doesn’t work that way.
    Will keeps the pot in the back of his sock drawer, and his mother has never found it. He buys it from a friend of his cousin’s at the junior college. We smoke a joint, or maybe two, quickly, passing it back and forth, our heads at the bathroom window, the wind fluttering our hair.
    What if she came home while we were smoking it? Or what if she smelled it?
    Giggling, kissing, blinking to focus our eyes, we spray a lot of room freshener afterwards and leave the window open until the odor is gone.
    You need something after school, you know. And instant coffee just doesn’t do it.
    But today we don’t hurry upstairs. We wait in the perfect kitchen with its glowing stove and refrigerator, the brass sun clock over the sink, the gleaming knives in perfect order in the rack above the counter, the hand-painted tiles of chickens and ducks on the wall above the stove. We wait for the kettle to whistle. Will goes to the stack of mail on the kitchen counter.
    I study him while he flips through the