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JADE COMES OVER and sits at the foot of Emma’s bed. She circles Emma’s ankle with her small, warm hand. “Love,” she says. “That was beautiful. They should’ve let you publish it.”

Emma shrugs. “Well, they didn’t.”

Celia seems to be at a loss for words. She’s gazing down into her lap, her shoulders slumped.

“I’m glad you wrote it, even so,” Jade says. “But you have to keep talking, Emma. You can’t shut yourself away. You have to take care of yourself. And most importantly, you can’t hurt yourself again. Claire wouldn’t want that.”

It doesn’t matter what Claire wants anymore, does it? And why should I take care of myself when the world is ending?

Emma turns to the wall. She just wishes they would go away. She isn’t like them anymore, and there’s no way she can make them understand this.

“I might want a L?rabar,” Celia says softly, but no one acknowledges her. Emma wonders briefly if Lori might say Celia is eating her feelings.

“Claire was an amazing person,” Jade says softly. “Remember how she’d come up from New York to take us out to pizza?”

Of course Emma remembers. The last time Claire took them to Vinnie’s Pizza Pie was two months before she killed herself.

“We’d eat soooo much,” Jade goes on, “and then she’d buy us a whole other pie to take back to the dorm.”

“Vinnie’s PP,” Celia murmurs wistfully. “I haven’t been there in ages.”

“She always seemed so happy,” Jade says. “So full of life and stuff.”

“She was good at everything,” Emma says, “including acting like she was happy. Acting the way everyone wanted her to—as if it was all okay and everything was going to turn out fine.”

“You must miss her so much,” Jade says.

Emma grits her teeth. It must be so hard.

You must miss her. You must be really struggling right now.

Why does everyone she ever talks to feel the need to state the totally fucking obvious?

And why is no one listening? She just said she won’t do what Claire did—pretend until she broke.

She’s done pretending. She’ll be broken out in the open, and at least something she does will matter when she draws attention to a problem larger than Claire, larger than Ridgemont, larger than all of them.

“Have you thought about taking time off?” Celia asks. “Ridgemont’s tough, like you said in your thing. I mean, your piece. Maybe you ought to give yourself a break.”

Jade nods. “Would your dad let you?”

Everyone knows what a hard-ass Byron Blake is.

Emma rolls back over to face them. Of course he wouldn’t. It isn’t a question worth answering, just like all the others. “I’m fine,” she says. “I’m just dealing with things in my own way.”

Celia comes over to sit on the bed too, and the mattress sags with the weight of all three girls. “We miss you on the paper,” she says.

Celia, Emma, and Jade were part of the Ridgemont Trumpet since the beginning. Jade was the gossip columnist and copyeditor; Celia was managing editor.

“Mr. Jordan promoted Soren to editor in chief, even though everyone knows he’s a perfect knob,” Jade adds. “And I think Prue Bailey must be high, because her edits really suck lately.”

Emma can’t help smiling a little. “Her edits always sucked,” she says.

“So you don’t think she’s taking hits off Caleb’s bong before class. Interesting,” Jade says. “Maybe we should investigate, Cel. Or we could run a blind item.”

“Come back to the Trumpet,” Celia blurts. “It can be like it was.”

“No,” Emma says, serious again. “It can’t ever be like it was.”

Jade lays her head down on Emma’s long legs. “Babe,” she says, “we love you. We miss you. We just want you to feel better.”

“Look, I appreciate what you’re doing,” Emma says. “I know you’re trying to help.” Jade’s silky hair spills over her shins. “But I’m fine. You guys need to worry about yourselves—there’s the SATs coming up, plus the AP exams—”

“That reminds me, I’m so going to fail my French tomorrow,” Jade mutters. “ Merde. ”

“Can you promise,” Celia says, “that you’ll talk to us if you need anything? And I mean anything. ”

Emma realizes she does need something. “Can I borrow your car?”

Celia looks surprised for a second. Then she says, “Um, yeah, sure! Of course.”

“Thanks a lot.”

And Emma smiles genuinely, because now she’s solved the problem of how to get a canister of gasoline.