People at school noticed.

That was almost the worst part — being noticed.

Grief makes you into a kind of exhibit.

For the first few weeks after November, people were careful and kind in that stiff, frightened way, and then, the way it always goes, the world moved on and left me standing where I was.

By spring I had become the boy whose parents died, a fact that hung around me like a smell, and people did not know what to do with it, so mostly they did nothing.

I ate lunch alone.