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DURING LAST PERIOD, WYATT knocked on Regan’s office door. “Got a minute?” he asked. He plopped down in a chair. “So what’s the plan?”

“I’m going to live with my parents for the summer. Then I’ll be in Bangladesh for three months. Then grad school.” She bustled back and forth from the printer to her desk.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Well, I don’t want to say I don’t want to teach anymore because that’s not true. But I don’t want to be in public education, I guess. So I found this place for community-based education. Sex education.” Regan hoped to work with small organizations to teach students about sexuality, date rape, and other important issues.

“Where did this come from?”

Regan sat down. “When I was in undergrad, I almost switched my major to human sexuality. Then I took this education class that talked about everything that’s wrong with the system, and I thought, ‘I have to be part of the change.’ ” She scoffed, mocking her idealism.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“This place.”

“Yeah,” Wyatt said. “I get that. I just had a racial issue the other day. And I heard about your issue with [the movie].”

Regan rolled her eyes. “The whole thing is just so stupid. Someone came up to me and flat-out said, ‘People don’t like you.’ It’s ridiculous to have someone say that to you. So now, what, I go to work every day, worried about who hates me?”

“I don’t think anyone hates you, Davis. I think the problem people have with you is that you’re . . . Well, you put yourself in the front of the class, so to speak. You’ve got a personality. And you don’t try to hide it, and you don’t try to please anyone, and people just don’t get that. I mean, you came into school with bright red hair, you’ve made some odd decisions. People can’t understand it.”

“I get that,” Regan said. “It’s been that way my entire life. Do you think this is something new to me? Because it’s not. I’m just disappointed that at the end of the day, it’s adults acting like this.”

“Do you really think that anyone in our department could be classified as an adult?”

“No,” Regan said. “That’s what’s scary to me. It’s gotten to the point that I don’t trust anyone. I hate to say this, but talking to you right now, all I’m thinking is, ‘Who’s he gonna tell?’ And I think that’s awful. That’s not the kind of place I want to work at.”

“Hey. Are we past that?” he asked.

She couldn’t meet his eyes. “Yeah,” she said, but she wasn’t sure. “Yeah, you know me: overcome, adapt, improvise. I get over things.” She tried to change the subject. “I just don’t need people going around talking about me when they don’t even know me. You know, I had a student tell me that someone said they didn’t like me.”

Wyatt shook his head, knowing Regan referred to Mandy. “Jesus. You’ve got to be kidding me. She didn’t.”

“Oh, she did,” Regan said and explained the story. “I think I’m a pretty good person and I don’t go out to hurt anyone, so I don’t know why people want to hurt me.”

“She’s the school bully,” Wyatt said. “She feeds off of fear. She makes herself known by scaring people.”

“I’m not scared of her,” Regan said. “I just don’t like what she does.”

“She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

“How can she not? How can she look in the mirror and not see that she’s awful? Did you hear about what happened at that faculty meeting?”

He rolled his head back and looked at the ceiling. “Yes. We got into a fight over that.”

“What?!”

“She told me how Theodore mistook her for you, and how she screamed at him. And I said to her, ‘What is wrong with you?’ She was like, ‘What do you mean? She’s a bitch.’ And I said, ‘No, you’re a bitch. She’s done nothing to you.’ That’s when I realized that girl is poisonous. I told her, ‘I want nothing to do with you.’ I don’t want people to associate me with her.”

When Regan recovered from her surprise, she said, “I just don’t get it. I mean, in this little competition she has with me that’s in her head, didn’t she win?”

“No, she didn’t. How did she win?” he asked. Before Regan could