“The following students will gather their belongings and come directly to my office,” the vice principal said, lifting a piece of paper from his side and taking a small step forward. A frown latched onto his face as he began to read: “Priya Bhatnagar. Tran Binh. Neil Casey.” He read out each name, a pause after each, each one a sentence. Some of us stopped breathing. Others started panting. When he got to Dale’s name, the vice principal’s face registered nothing. He read it and kept going, on and on down the list, our names falling in a volley like cannon shot.

When he’d finished, we packed up our things and rose to follow him. Our classmates eyed us curiously as we went; Mr. Everett, arms still folded over his chest, snapped his shoulders back another inch. In the hall, we fell into a single-file line. The fear was burning white-hot inside us, but none of us said a word as we followed the vice principal down the hall.

Nancy was the one who had broken.

The afternoon before, she’d found a letter in her mailbox informing her that she hadn’t gotten the internship at St. Timothy’s. At 8:10 the next morning, instead of heading to first period, she went straight to the main office and told the secretary, Mrs. Feather, a jowly woman who favored plum lipsticks and beige clothes, that nearly half of Mr. Everett’s Honors Calculus class had been involved in a cheating scheme for the past six months.

Mrs. Feather told Nancy to take a seat. She got up from her desk and crossed to the half-open door of Principal Brown’s office.

A few minutes later, Nancy was ushered in to repeat her story for the principal and vice principal. She was asked to give more detail, to name names. Who actually broke into the school?, Vice Principal Gilman wanted to know. Who else was involved?

Nancy told them everything. When she’d finished, she asked if she could go home for the day. The principals couldn’t allow that, but they relented and let her lie down in Nurse Nowak’s office, where she spent the next two periods contemplating the ruined landscape of her future.

Whose idea was it?

“Neil Casey’s.”

Whose idea was it?

“Dale Gilman’s.”

How long has it been going on?

“Five months, maybe six.”

“Since, like, October?”

And the stealing?

“Dale had a key, but I don’t know how he did it.”

“I think my parents should be here.”

“Are you going to tell my parents?”

Who’s the one responsible?

“Dale’s the one who broke in.”

“Dale had the key.”

“Yeah, it was Dale.”

Eight years after his expulsion from Truman South, Dale Gilman, on a Tuesday night in late June, hopped on the interstate headed west—away from the city, out of the suburbs where he still lived with his parents in the ranch-style home he’d grown up in—and forty miles out into flat, scrubby land that seemed to go on forever, nothing on the road but the car he was driving (a green Mazda Miata his father had passed down to him when he upgraded to a newer model four years before), he plowed into the base of a billboard sign going ninety miles an hour: sober, then dead, at the moment of impact.