It wasn’t like I was a cruel or heartless person. I believed in charity as much as anyone else. But after everything I’d been through the last few months, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around reaching out to others. My mother had taught me too well to look out for number one, and right now, in this strange world, this seemed smarter than ever. Still, every time I passed the HELP table, taking in that day’s cause—Upcoming AIDS walk! Buy a cookie, it benefits early literacy! Save the Animals!—I felt strangely unsettled by all this want, not to mention the assumed and steady outpouring of help in return, which seemed to come as instinctively to the people here as keeping to myself did to me.

One person who clearly was a giver was Heather Wainwright, who always seemed to be at the HELP table, regardless of the cause. I’d seen her lecturing a group of girls with smoothies on the plight of the Tibetans, selling cupcakes for cancer research, and signing up volunteers to help clean up the stretch of highway Perkins Day sponsored, and she seemed equally passionate about all of them. This was yet another reason, at least in my mind, that whatever rumors were circulating about Nate and me couldn’t have been more off the mark. Clearly, I wasn’t his type, by a long shot.

Of course, if I had wanted to make friends with people more like me, I could have. The burnout contingent at Perkins Day was less scruffy than their Jackson counterparts but still easily recognizable, hanging out by the far end of the quad near the art building in a spot everyone called the Smokestack. At Jackson, the stoners and the art freaks were two distinct groups, but at Perkins, they had comingled, either because of the reduced population or the fact that there was safety in numbers. So alongside the guys in the rumpled Phish T-shirts, Hackey-sacking in their flip-flops, you also had girls in dresses from the vintage shop and combat boots, sporting multicolored hair and tattoos. The population of the Smokestack usually showed up about halfway through lunch, trickling in from the path that led to the lower soccer fields, which were farthest away from the rest of the school. Once they arrived, they could be seen furtively trading Visine bottles and scarfing down food from the vending machine, stoner behavior so classic and obvious I was continually surprised the administration didn’t swoop in and bust them en masse.

It would have been so easy to walk over and join them, but even after a few lunches spent with only my sandwich, I still hadn’t done so. Maybe because I wouldn’t be there long, anyway—it wasn’t like there was much point in making friends. Or maybe it was something else. Like the fact that I had a second chance now, an opportunity, whether I’d first welcomed it or not, to do things differently. It seemed stupid to not at least try to take it. It wasn’t like the old way had been working for me so well, anyway.

Still, there was one person at Perkins Day that, if pressed, I could imagine hanging out with. Maybe because she was the only one less interested in making friends than I was.

By now, I’d figured out a few things about Olivia Davis, my seatmate and fellow Jackson survivor. Number one: she was always on the phone. The minute the bell rang, she had it out and open, quick as a gunslinger, one finger already dialing. She kept it clamped to her ear as she walked between classes and all through lunch, which she also spent alone, eating a sandwich she brought from home and talking the entire time. From the few snippets I overheard before our class started and just after it ended, she was mostly talking to friends, although occasionally she’d affect an annoyed, flat tone that screamed parental conversation. Usually, though, she was all noisy chatter, discussing the same things, in fact, that I heard from everyone else in the hallways or around me in my classrooms—school, parties, stress—except that her conversations were one-sided, her voice the only one I could hear.

It was also clear that Olivia was at Perkins Day under protest, and a vocal one at that. I had strong opinions about our classmates and their lifestyles but kept these thoughts to myself. Olivia practiced no such discretion.

“Yeah, right,” she’d say under her breath as Heather Wainwright began a long analysis of the symbolism of poverty in David Copperfield. “Like you know from poverty. In your BMW and million-dollar mansion.”

“Ah, yes,” she’d murmur as one of the back-row jocks, prodded by Ms. Conyers to contribute, equated his experience not making starter with a character’s struggle, “tell us about your pain. We’re riveted.”

Sometimes she didn’t say anything but still made her point by sighing loudly, shaking her head, and throwing why-me-Lord? looks up at the ceiling. At first, her tortuous endurance of second period was funny to me, but after a while, it got kind of annoying, not to mention distracting. Finally, on Friday, after she’d literally tossed her hands up as one of our classmates struggled to define “blue collar,” I couldn’t help myself.

“If you hate this place so much,” I said, “why are you here?”

She turned her head slowly, as if seeing me for the first time. “Excuse me?” she said.

I shrugged. “It’s not like it’s cheap. Seems like a waste of money is all I’m saying.”

Olivia adjusted herself in her seat, as if perhaps a change of position might help her to understand why the hell I was talking to her. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but do we know each other? ”

“It’s just a question,” I said.

Ms. Conyers, up at the front of the room, was saying something about the status quo. I flipped a few pages in my notebook, feeling Olivia watching me. After a moment, I looked up and met her gaze, letting her know she didn’t intimidate me.