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their faces a mixture of shock and compassion. Michael was young, but he wasn’t stupid. He also wasn’t strong when it came to defending himself against his grandpa, so he didn’t deny what he’d said, he didn’t yell back. He accepted his words and felt their anger and frustration saturate his skin.
    “Someone from the hospital will call you,” one of the men said to no one in particular. Michael looked at his mother, her face serene, already asleep. He wondered if she was content. Had she gotten what she wanted? Was it her plan to be taken from this house, taken violently because she didn’t have the strength to leave peacefully? He might never know. She had tried this before but of course had never given a full explanation as to why, at least not to her family. Perhaps her doctor, the psychiatrist, had a better understanding of why she harmed herself, but if he did know, he never felt obliged or compelled to share it with those closest to her. Her family was forced to guess.
    As they wheeled her out on the stretcher, Michael noticed that the bleeding had stopped. That was a good sign. The cuts wouldn’t be so deep this time. She would stay in the hospital for a few days, recover, and then come home to resume her place in the family. No one would mention this night, and this disturbance while not forgotten would go unspoken.
    One last look. His mother was sleeping now, her eyes closed, her expression blank but soft. The pain, wherever it came from, was sleeping now too. A sheet covered the straitjacket, so as she was wheeled away, if Michael wanted to, he could forget it was there; he could imagine that she was simply being taken to the hospital for routine surgery. Remove a gallbladder or an appendix. Something that wouldn’t return to destroy the fragile foundation this family was built upon.
    He left his grandparents to their beer and rosary and went back up to his room. From his window he saw the ambulance drive away, down the dirt road and into the night. Despite everything, he couldn’t help but think how lucky his mother was. At least she, for a time, was elsewhere.

chapter 3
    First day back to school was never a happy time for Michael. First day back to school when your mother was in the hospital under psychiatric evaluation made the day even worse.
    Last year when Michael entered Weeping Water High School he thought things might improve from his grammar school and junior high days; he might find someone, anyone, who shared his desire for knowledge. He thought his new classmates might be a little smarter, might be a bit more interested in actually learning about world history or English literature and not just in figuring out the easiest way to cut class without getting caught. No such luck.
    The majority of kids at Two W mainly fell into two camps—the jocks and cheerleaders who thought life should be spent on the football field, and the slackers who preferred to watch life speed by them. The only thing the two camps had in common was a desire to learn the least amount of studying they would have to do to produce a report card full of average grades.
    Of course Michael wasn’t an anomaly; there were other kids in school who wanted to learn, who wanted to learn as much as possible in order to get accepted into a good college so they could have the kind of life and career that the Weeping Water public school system on its own couldn’t provide. Problem was that none of those kids wanted to be Michael’s friend.
    In a small town, word travels fast, and before he had even put in one full day as a freshman, the entire student body knew that Michael Howard was the kid whose mother was in and out of psychiatric care and who was kind of weird himself. It didn’t matter that Michael was an excellent student, salutatorian of his junior high class. Not a star athlete but definitely not the most uncoordinated kid in gym class. He just didn’t fit in.
    The whispers had begun about Michael well before his teen