The first thing that happened is that Sandy McMaster died. She didn't just die, really, she killed herself, but they didn't tell us that to begin with. Mrs. Beebe told us in one morning in homeroom. She said, "I'm very sorry to tell you that your classmate, Sandy, has died."

Sandy wasn't really my friend, but she was in the same room as I was ever since third grade, and my eyes filled up right away. A couple other kids started crying, too, but most of them sat there like they didn't know what to do. Then Smelly Shelly Demsky raised her hand and asked how Sandy died. Someone made a fart noise.

Mrs. Beebe looked all over the room and then up at the ceiling, like maybe Sandy's ghost was up there, and then she said, "I don't know, I only just heard about it a few minutes ago." Her chin quivered and I could tell she was about to cry. It must have been hard to be a teacher who had a pupil die.

Then Bobby Hall raised his hand and he said, "Couldn't we make a card from the whole class for her family? Because they must be really sad." Mrs. Beebe said, "That's a really good idea, Bobby, we'll make a sympathy card," and we talked about how we would make it and what we wanted it to say. We got out construction paper and scissors and glue. We made it out of a big piece of light blue construction paper folded in half. On the outside Terence — he had the nicest printing — wrote "We're so sorry for your loss," and we surrounded the words with ribbons cut out of yellow construction paper. On the inside it said, "From the students of Mrs. Beebe's class," and everybody made ribbons or bows or hearts and signed their names on them. We wrote messages on them, too. I made a red heart and wrote, "I'll really miss Sandy, she was a really nice person — Carolyn Vandervander." and she was a nice person, too, even though I wasn't really friends with her.

Halfway through the period Mr. Eliot, the principal, made an announcement on the intercom about Sandy and he said a special counselor named Mr. Byrd would be at the school counselor's office all day for Sandy's friends and classmates who wanted to talk with someone. Teachers were supposed to excuse any pupils who wanted to see him.

Latisha leaned over and asked me in a whisper if I was going to go and see him, and I said I didn't think so. She said, "Me neither, I'd rather talk with my friends than with some guy I never met." Latisha wasn't really Sandy's friend, either, but sometimes she used to help Sandy with her arithmetic, so she knew her better than I did.

The class period ended and we went to Mr. Ward's room for Social Studies. Everything seemed to go back to normal, and it was like that for the rest of the day. All the teachers knew we were the class Sandy had been in, and they all said stuff at the beginning of the class period about being sorry about her, but homeroom was the only class we talked about it much, or where we didn't do normal class stuff or have to turn in our homework or have more homework assigned to us. I didn't see anybody go up to the front of the classroom like they were asking permission to see the counselor. Everybody tried to guess at recess how she died, but since nobody knew for sure it was like nobody had anything more to say about her. "It's weird," I said to Latisha at lunch. " It's like nobody knew her. It's like nothing happened." "Yeah, " said Latisha. "All I did was help her with her arithmetic sometimes, but now I wonder if I was the best friend she had."

I'd never thought much about Sandy before. She was a nice person, that's all I really thought about her. And that she was really quiet. I never noticed if she had friends or who they were. Now when I tried to remember it seemed like she was always by herself, except when we had to divide up into groups for a project or teams in P.E. or something. Once in fifth grade I was paired up with her for a library project. We were supposed to find out everything we could about the planet Mercury. I was mad because Mr. Behm, our teacher, wouldn't let me pair up with Latisha. Mr. Behm had some idea that best friends shouldn't work on projects together because they'd just goof off or something. Sandy was so shy that I always had to be the one to go ask the librarian or Mr. Behm whenever we had a question, and that made me mad, too. But she was nice, and she did her fair share of the work. She was smart, too. She never raised her hand very much, but if a teacher called on her she usually had the answer.

That day after school my dad picked me up because I had a dentist's appointment. I told him in the car Sandy McMaster died, and he looked blank like he didn't know who she was. I guess I never talked about her. "Is she one of Dan McMaster's kids?" he asked. I didn't know who her father was, but her brother Larry was one year ahead of us in school, so I told Dad about him. Larry McMaster was kind of scuzzy and creepy. I saw him smoking cigarettes sometimes, even though he was only in seventh grade, with some of the other really scuzzy guys out by the junior high football field. He always looked creepy and dirty, and I used to feel sorry for Sandy having a creepy brother like that. My dad nodded his head and said, "Yep, that sounds like Dan McMaster's family, all right."

At the dentist's office Dr. Kurta asked me how I was doing, but I couldn't talk very well because his fingers were in my mouth and my mouth was numb from Novocaine, so I just said fine, even though I wanted to tell him about Sandy because I thought he might have known her. There were only three dentists in town, so she could have been his patient. But all that happened was that he filled a cavity and said I needed to be better about brushing my teeth.

After we got home Dad was the one to tell Mom about Sandy because my mouth was still numb. Mom said, "Oh, that's so sad," but she didn't know who Sandy was, either. She asked me if I wanted to talk about it, but it didn't seem like there was anything to say. It was like nobody knew who Sandy was.

The next morning at breakfast Dad read Sandy's obituary in the paper out loud to me. It didn't say anything about how Sandy died, but it said who her family was and where and when her funeral would be on Saturday. He asked me if I wanted to go to it. I said no, but I felt mixed up about it. Mom and Dad were supposed to go skiing with my aunt and uncle and they were all counting on me to babysit my sister Amy and my cousin Kendra. It would wreck their plans if I went to Sandy's funeral. Besides, Sandy's brother was creepy, and from what Dad said about her dad, it sounded like he and probably the rest of her family were creepy, too. But I wondered if anybody besides her family would go to the funeral. I wondered if she had any friends.

In homeroom that morning Mrs. Beebe mentioned that the funeral would be the next day and said if anyone wanted to donate money she'd get flowers for the funeral to go with the card. I only had fifty cents so that's what I gave her. Then we turned in our homework on vocabulary words from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Evangeline" that we were supposed to have turned in the previous day, and then we started reading the next section of "Evangeline" out loud, and everybody forgot about Sandy. None of the other teachers said anything about Sandy that day, and I didn't hear any of the other kids say anything about her at recess or lunch except me and Latisha. And all we said was, "Gee, nobody even cares."

The next day was Saturday, and I was so busy with Amy and Kendra, watching cartoons and playing games and making lunch, that I almost forgot all about Sandy's funeral. I remembered right in the middle of watching "Beauty and the Beast," which was one of my favorite movies, so I tried to push the thought back out of my mind. But after a couple of minutes I left the little kids watching it and went to my parents' bedroom. I got the incense burner and a cone of incense and the lighter out of my mother's bedside stand and took them to my room. I lit the incense and sat on my bed thinking about Sandy. Amy and Kendra must have smelled the incense, because suddenly they were standing in my doorway, and Amy said, "You're not supposed to do that," because once I got in trouble for burning my mom's incense and putting a hole in my bedspread from a spark. I said, "I'm burning it for a friend of mine who died," even though Sandy wasn't really my friend. Amy and Kendra didn't know very much about death, but they came in and sat with me on my bed and we all stayed there without saying anything until the incense burned away. Then I put the incense burner and lighter back in my mother's bedside stand and we went back to the living room and I rewound "Beauty and the Beast" to where it was when I left. It was just ending when Mom and Dad and my aunt and uncle got back from skiing.

The next day was Sunday and we went to church. Amy went downstairs to Sunday school. I usually went downstairs, too, but I wanted to sit upstairs with the grown-ups this time. Somehow it seemed a righter thing to do. Father Seibicke did a really long sermon with big words I didn't know, and it was hard to pay attention and not get bored, but I did my best. The verse he was talking about was printed in the church bulletin. It said, "But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you."

Father Seibicke said the verse was from the Sermon on the Mount. I learned about the Sermon on the Mount in Sunday school, but I didn't remember this verse. Fasting meant going without food in order to pray better or out of grief or mourning. Father Seibicke said that Jesus was speaking against people who made such a big show out of how holy they were that they forgot about true holiness. Their prayers were empty, he said. I didn't want my prayers to be empty. I could fast for Sandy, but I would have to be secret about it or it wouldn't mean anything and I would be a hypocrite.

I ate dinner that night, but I didn't take seconds, and for breakfast Monday morning I had just half a bowl of Rice Krispies. Mrs. Beebe said in homeroom that Sandy's family was grateful for the card we had made and she said our flowers at the funeral were beautiful. I didn't know Mrs. Beebe was actually going to go to the funeral. I was glad she did. We read more of "Evangeline" and talked about it and nobody else said anything about Sandy all morning.

At lunchtime I told Latisha I wasn't hungry and I gave her all my lunch. Latisha liked food, and she was always begging something or another from my lunch, but I never gave her my whole lunch before. She was still chewing on my peanut butter sandwich when she saw something. "Look out," she said around her mouthful. "Smelly Shelly's heading our way."

Shelly Demsky came over and stood by the table looking at us. "I found out how Sandy McMaster died," she announced.

Latisha stopped chewing. "How do you know?"

Shelly sat down. "My brother Mike is friends with her brother Larry, and he's back in school today. Mike just told me."

Shelly sat there waiting for one of us to ask, so Latisha did. "Well, how did she die then?"

"She killed herself," Shelly said.

Latisha put the sandwich down. "That's horrible," she said. "Nobody does that."

"She did," said Shelly. "Mike says Larry said she got some antifreeze out of the garage and drank it out of a cup just like it was Kool-Aid."

She sat there staring at us, but we didn't say anything so she finally got up and went to another table to tell the kids there, too.

"Give me a break!" Latisha scoffed. "Antifreeze!"

"My dad told me once when he was working on the car that antifreeze was poisonous even though it smelled sweet," I said.

"I can't believe it," Latisha said. "Nobody does that. Do you believe it?"

"I've heard of people killing themselves."

"Nobody our age," she said. "Things have to be pretty bad to kill yourself."

I tried to imagine things being so bad that I'd kill myself. It was hard. I got mad at my parents or sister sometimes, and sometimes I got really sad about something I saw on the TV news, but it was never so bad I wanted to kill myself. I had a hard time believing that Sandy had killed herself, too.

By the time school was out everybody must have known what Shelly said. If Shelly didn't tell them, kids she had told told them. It was all anybody talked about during afternoon recess, and I could tell nobody was paying much attention to what the teachers said in classes the rest of the day. I know I wasn't. I was still trying to imagine things being so bad that I'd kill myself. I was trying to imagine what it would be like to pour a glass of antifreeze like Kool-Aid and to drink it down knowing it would kill me.

Before dinner that night I went into the kitchen and told Mom I didn't feel hungry. "Are you feeling okay, honey?" she asked. She looked worried. I said, "Shelly Demsky says her brother Mike is friends with Larry McMaster and that Sandy killed herself by drinking antifreeze." My mom really looked worried then. She said, "Oh, that's awful," and she called my dad into the kitchen and told him. He looked worried, too, and he said he was going to call my teacher. They said I didn't have to eat dinner and I went to my room. I couldn't bum any incense because they were at home, but fasting was supposed to help your prayers, so I prayed that however bad things were for Sandy before she died, that they were better for her now.

In the morning I only had a piece of toast and a small glass of orange juice. My mom still looked worried when she dropped me off at school. In homeroom Mrs. Beebe looked worried too, and when she started talking her chin quivered like it did the day she told us Sandy was dead. She said, "There were a lot of rumors yesterday that Sandy McMaster died because she killed herself. I've been authorized to tell you that those rumors are true. For some reason Sandy was very unhappy. I don't really know why, though I tried to talk with her about it." She looked up at the ceiling, her chin quivering, and suddenly she turned around, her back to us. Her shoulders were shaking, so I knew she was crying. I had never seen a teacher cry before, and I wished I knew how to comfort her. Some kids were starting to cry, too. After a minute I heard Mrs. Beebe blow her nose and then she turned around again. She said, "It's very hard when someone is so unhappy that they take their own life. Some of you must be very sad about it too. I've been asked to tell you that the school district has sent Mr. Byrd to us again, and he'll be at the school counselor's office all day for anyone who would like to talk with him." This time three kids raised their hands. One was Smelly Shelly, who got all the rumors going to begin with. One of them was Latisha. They went to the front of the room and Mrs. Beebe wrote out hall passes for them. Then we read the last part of "Evangeline" and talked about it and Mrs. Beebe assigned us to write a poem for Thursday.

The next time I saw Latisha was at lunch. I gave her my lunch again. "Gee, are you feeling okay?" she asked, but she liked the tunafish sandwich my mom made. I asked her what the counselor said because I was thinking about going and talking with him, too. But she didn't like him very much. "He kept on asking me how I was feeling," she said, "but when I told him I felt bad for Sandy and wished I was a better friend to her, it was like he didn't hear me. He was acting like he thought I was gonna up and kill myself, too. He said sometimes when a kid kills herself other kids who have thoughts about killing themselves do it too. I kept saying, I ain't gonna kill myself, but that's all he talked about." She pointed. "Look, that's him right there, with Mrs. Beebe."

I turned and looked. Mrs. Beebe was at the entrance of the cafeteria with a short guy with a mustache who looked really young. She was pointing around the room telling him something, and he was listening and nodding his head. They turned and left the cafeteria.

"He doesn't look much like a counselor to me," I said. "He looks my Uncle Todd." My uncle was short just like that. He was a wrestling coach at the high school.

"That would be weird, your uncle being a counselor," Latisha laughed. "Well, this guy was okay, I guess," she said. "But it's better talking to you." Then she frowned. "They tried to keep it a secret from us, you know."

"What secret?"

"You know. How she died. Remember what Mrs. Beebe said? She said, 'I've been authorized to tell you.' That means she knew Sandy killed herself, but they didn't allow her to tell us."

"That's dumb," I said. "Because Larry came back to school and we all found out anyway."

Latisha shrugged. She got done with my sandwich and opened her own lunch bag. "Oh, yuck. Leftover meatloaf sandwich." She pushed the bag away and picked up the apple from my lunch.

"Latisha — do you think Mrs. Beebe knew? That first day, when she told us Sandy was dead?"

Latisha bit into the apple and sat there chewing for a minute, looking up at the ceiling like Mrs. Beebe had done. "Yeah, I guess I do."

"Me too," I decided. "But why didn't they tell us?"

She shrugged again. "Maybe for the same reason Mr. Byrd kept on deciding I was gonna kill myself. Maybe they thought it would give us ideas."

I thought about that. I never would've thought of drinking antifreeze like Kool-Aid if Sandy hadn't done it. But I still didn't actually want to do it myself. Did other people want to do it just because Sandy did? Latisha didn't want to. I thought about what Latisha said, about wishing she was a better friend to Sandy. That's what I wished, too. Maybe things wouldn't have been so bad that Sandy killed herself if she had friends besides her creepy family. Maybe if instead of being mad in fifth grade that Mr. Behm wouldn't let me be partners with my best friend Latisha on the planet Mercury project, I could've decided to be friends with Sandy, too. Me being a friend to her might not have been to stop her from killing herself, but maybe it would have, too. If she still killed herself I would feel worse than I did now, because I would have been her friend and would miss her, but that seemed more right to me than not really caring about her or missing her at all. That was the very worst thing to me, that nobody paid any attention to her when she was alive except Mrs. Beebe a little bit and Latisha a little bit, and now that she was dead still nobody cared, not even me.

That night I was babysitting Amy again because Mom and Dad were going to a going-away dinner for one of the people at Mom's job. Both me and Amy had homework to do, so mostly all I had to do was to warm up leftovers for Amy. I didn't warm up any for me because I was still fasting. I got done with my social studies and math pretty fast — it was just reading a chapter about the Middle East and answering some questions that the chapter had all the answers to, and there were only ten problems on sets and subsets in math. I thought about watching some TV, but then I remembered the poem Mrs. Beebe assigned to us, and I decided to work on that. But then I couldn't think of anything to write about. I opened up my copy of "Evangeline,"which I really liked, but I didn't know anything about Arcadia so I couldn't write about that. I could write about our vacation to Glacier Park last summer, but every time I wrote something down it was boring. I couldn't think about the trip very well because I kept thinking about why would somebody kill herself. I decided to give up and watch TV when Amy asked me a question about her homework.

Amy was in third grade and she was just learning long division. She had the same teacher I did when I was in third grade, Mrs. Hugo, and Mrs. Hugo didn't know how to explain long division very well. I tried to remember how Dad had explained it to me so that I could explain it to Amy, but mostly I just ended up doing all the problems. I'd have to ask Dad to explain it to Amy. I could do arithmetic, but I wasn't good at explaining it, like my dad was, or Latisha was. I was good at some things, but not others. Mrs. Hugo was good at teaching some things, but not others.

Maybe Sandy was like that, too. She was smart, but maybe she wasn't good at making friends. Maybe she needed help making friends, just like she needed Latisha's help with her arithmetic, just like Amy and I needed Dad's help learning long division. Maybe she needed help making friends, but nobody knew to help her except Mrs. Beebe, but Mrs. Beebe had twenty kids in her homeroom, and lots of other kids she taught English to, and her own husband and children to take care of, too. Maybe Sandy felt bad and she was all alone with nobody to help her. Maybe her mom and dad were creepy, or just didn't pay attention to her, like Latisha's mom and dad. But Latisha had her brother Marcus and she had me. And I had Latisha and my mom and dad and Amy and my Uncle Todd and Aunt Ann. I tried to imagine what it would be like if I didn't have any of them. If I could imagine that, I could probably imagine what it was like to feel the way Sandy did when she decided to kill herself. Suddenly I knew what my poem should be about.

At 8:30 it was Amy's bedtime. I sat with her and read a story with her like my parents always did, like they used to do with me when I was littler, and then I turned off Amy's light and shut the door. I got the lighter and an incense cone and put on my coat and took the incense outside on the back porch so the smell wouldn't be in the house when Mom and Dad got home. I lit the incense cone, on the barbecue.

I didn't really pray this time. I looked up at the stars and imagined that one of them was Sandy, and that she could smell the incense, too. I told her I hadn't acted like a friend to her, and I was sorry she was so alone when she died. When all the incense was gone I went back into the house and hung up my coat and put the lighter away. I was doing the dishes when Mom and Dad got home.

The next morning I had half a bowl of Cheerios. At school I stood outside Mrs. Beebe's classroom before class started so I could talk with her. I didn't know exactly what I was going to say, but when she got there and asked me what she could do for me, I just blurted out, "Thanks for caring so much about Sandy, I know you did all you could." It took her by surprise, and she got teary-eyed, and I ran into the classroom and sat down. She didn't come in for a couple of minutes, and when she did she kept looking at me all through the class period. We were reading "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe now, and when it was Terrence's turn to read he said "Nevermore" in a funny raven voice that made everybody laugh, and Mrs. Beebe made him do the raven's part for the rest of the poem.

"Girl, something must be the matter with you," Latisha said in the cafeteria at lunchtime, but she still liked my egg salad sandwich better than the second leftover meatloaf sandwich in a row that her mom gave her, which she just smelled, made a face at, and threw in the garbage. We spent the whole rest of lunch reading "The Raven" and trying to make say "Nevermore" like Terrence did, till everybody in the whole cafeteria was staring at us, we were laughing so hard.

The first thing I did when I got home was to work on my poem. It was like trying to imagine being inside of Sandy just before she killed herself. But I didn't know anything about what her family was like except that her creepy brother was scuzzy and dirty and smoked cigarettes and her dad's name was Dan and my dad didn't think much of him, so it was hard to imagine actually being Sandy. So I imagined what I was imagining the night before, my mom and dad and little sister and best friend and aunt and uncle all being gone, and then all the worst possible things happening to me that had ever happened, and watching all the most horrible news stories about wars and famines and stuff, and not having anybody to talk with about them or to hug me when I was crying.

It took a long time, but I still got done before dinner. I told Mom my stomach hurt and she let me skip dinner. I sat at my desk and printed the poem out on a clean piece of paper as neatly as I could. I wished I could print as neatly as Terrence did. Then I read it aloud to Sandy and told her I felt like I knew a little bit how she felt, and it made me feel like I understood her better, and I was sorry I cared more about her now than I had when she was alive. I could tell she was listening.

In the morning I had a big bowl of Cheerios and a glass or orange juice. It felt weird to have a full stomach after not having more than half a bowl of cereal a day ever since Monday morning. In homeroom Mrs. Beebe said that instead of reading another famous poet we were going to read all the poems everybody had written and talk about them, half of them today and half of them tomorrow. Everybody had to take their poems and stand up in front of the class and read them. Terrence was first, and his was a really funny poem with sound effects like the raven saying "Nevermore" and car engines and stuff. Latisha's was funny, too, it was a story about something her brother Marcus did. Then it was Tom Eliason's turn — his was about fishing and not catching anything. Then Mrs. Beebe called on me. I was nervous, but I went to the front of the classroom. I said, "My poem is called, 'Wanting to Die' and it's for Sandy:

I'm alone in the house
All there is for company is the TV
Showing starving children
And people killing each other with guns
And I can't stand it anymore

That was all the further I got, and suddenly Mrs. Beebe was standing in front of me, with her eyes all glisteny and her chin quivering, and she said really quietly, so only I could hear, "Could you sit down now please, Carolyn?"

"But, Mrs. Beebe, I'm not done. . . ."

"Shhh," she said. "We'll talk about this after class, all right?" She took the poem out of my hand and walked me to my desk. Everybody was staring at me. Mrs. Beebe said, "Bobby, could you come up hear and read your poem?" and their eyes left me. Bobby went to the front of the class, but I didn't hear any of his poem, I felt so bad. I don't think Mrs. Beebe heard it, either. She sat at her desk and read my poem, and then she kept looking at me like she had the day before.

I don't know what went on in the rest of class. Mrs. Beebe wouldn't let me read my poem, and it was for Sandy, but everybody had already forgotten about Sandy, and they didn't want to hear about her, not even Mrs. Beebe, who supposedly cared about her. I tried to keep my tears back, but I couldn't all the way, and every once in awhile I'd sniff and people would turn around and stare at me. It was a relief when class was over and Mrs. Beebe asked me stay behind. Everybody left the room except me. Latisha looked back at me, and Mrs. Beebe went to her and they talked for a couple of minutes, and then Latisha looked at me really scared-looking and left and Mrs. Beebe came and said, "It'll be okay, Carolyn. . . ."

"Why did you stop me from reading my poem?" I asked. "It was for Sandy!" — and then I burst out crying.

Mrs. Beebe knelt down on the floor and gave me a Kleenex, "Shh, shh," and when I kept on crying, she held me, and then I heard her say, "No, children, stay out in the hall for a moment, it's all right, it'll only be a minute," and then she was hugging me tight, and she was saying, as though she was talking to herself, "They said this sometimes happens afterwards" and then, "Shh, shh, it's okay" again, all the time holding me and patting my back like burping a baby. She said, "It's all right, dear, no, you don't have to do that, shh, shh," and she kept doing that until I stopped crying. I was trying to break loose a little because now I was feeling embarrassed, and thought I should go to Social Studies, but she still held me tight.

"Latisha says you don't seem to have any appetite," I heard her say. Then she said, "We'll call up Mr. Byrd, I'm sure he can help," and I suddenly realized what she thought.