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Emily came into class every casually. Or at least, she was trying to look casual, but I could tell the German shepherd was nervous. I'd come into class a few minutes early, along with Jacob and some other guys who were talking about football or something. They weren't looking.

A crowd usually gathered outside Madame Allen's door in the minutes before French class started, savoring their last few moments of speaking English before they'd have to put less thought into what to say than how to say it. They seemed to forget that the middle-aged vixen tended not to enforce the French-only rule. I hadn't noticed Emily standing in the hall among the others when I'd passed the crowd on the way in. Perhaps she'd been standing away, pretending to search her locker for a pencil or something she didn't need, pretending she had a reason to hide herself, waiting for the class to file through the door to slip in among them, blending in like a clownfish in a school of sardines.

She and I used to be good friends, but that had been a couple of years ago. A lot can change in a couple of years. I could see she was still herself, or at least the same Emily everyone had last seen in French class about a month before. She might have been pretty if she hadn't been trying so hard to be. But the excessive makeup around her eyes, the deliberately low-cut shirts, the dyes she wore in the fur on her face that were supposed to be so much more subtle; it all added up to an object rather than a girl. She hung out with the popular people at Jamestown, the decidedly preppier of the county's schools, who partied and drank and had sex. The boys played football or lacrosse and the girls spent their time trying to look slutty. Here, we'd apparently become entirely too boring for her.

She sat down next to me, trying to mimic my indifference. The class was finally called to attention and the homework was gone over, questions answered, verb conjugations explained for the umpteenth time with the same grace and cheer as the first, while I sat daydreaming. I didn't really think about the bitch sitting next to me. It registered that she was still alive, but beyond that I genuinely didn't care about her.

At some point Mme. Allen passed out a worksheet and left us to our own devices. The good students talked among themselves about the assignment, trading advice and whatnot. The bad students went back to whatever they had been talking about before. I quietly started filling in the answers. Then Emily leaned over and said, "Hey."

"Hey, what's up?" I said, looking up at her only briefly.

Her tail began to move slightly when I responded to her. "So I was in a mental hospital," she told me as if it were a dirty little secret. I guess it kind of was, but it wouldn't have surprised anybody. As far as I could work out, I was about the only person at school who hadn't explicitly been a jerk to her, so she still counted me as a friend. I wished she wouldn't, but I didn't have the heart to tell the shepherd off. She definitely deserved it though; her little relationship with my best friend had all of us convinced that she was certifiably insane, and most of them didn't even know the half of it.

"Oh?" I said, not sure whether I even wanted to know the rest of this story. I was leaning towards not. She'd already said enough for me to know she'd tried to kill herself again.

"Yeah. I met this squirrel who was a hardcore coke addict. She was, like, fourteen, and she was, like, a hardcore coke addict." Between all the black mascara and shadow, her green eyes brightened as she spoke in a low, excited voice.

"Jeez." I tried not to continue the conversation. Maybe if I just put my muzzle to the paper and focused on the exercises on le subjonctif, she'd take a hint. But as little as I wanted to talk to Emily, she was more interesting than the worksheet. "Like, how do you even do that when you're fourteen?"

"I don't know," she said, even though we both had a pretty good idea of what a fourteen-year-old girl could do for drugs. "She was from, like, McLean or something."

"Figures. Parents with more money than... give-a-shit-ness."

"Give-a-shit-ness?" Emily giggled, the naughty, secretive smile on her muzzle opening up into a more honest one.

"You know what I mean. Kids left to their own devices, probably bored as shit," I said. "That's the result you're gonna get."

Emily looked a little indignant at that. "What, so, like, we need constant parental supervision or else we'll just, like, go crazy?"

As much as I wanted to point out that she was not at all one to talk, it was neither the place nor time. "Well, for one thing, it's a big difference between fourteen and sixteen," I said, "and if she's that fucked up now, she didn't just start going out a month ago either. Wouldn't be surprised if she was climbing out her window when she was, like, twelve."

"Yeah, true. I guess squirrels are good climbers."

"That's fucked up, though. Did you talk to her?"

"Not really. We just met in, like, group therapy and stuff."

"Oh. Any other horror stories?" At this point I honestly didn't know why I was still talking to her. Encouraging the conversation, even. I didn't like her. She'd half-ruined my friend's life, and not that I wished it, but I wouldn't have minded if she'd actually succeeded in one of her suicide attempts.

"Yeah, but that's the most interesting one. It was mostly people with, like, actual mental illnesses and stuff," she said.

At this point people started looking up at the clock and realized class was over. Madame Allen dismissed the class, with a cheer and enthusiasm returned by only a handful of loyal students. I got up to go, getting my notebooks together deliberately quickly so as to get away from Emily. Out the door, I made a point of latching on to a group of my friends, to look occupied.

I had the next period free, so I met John by our lockers. He was a dark-furred wolf, a head and a half taller than me. Out of instinct and habit, we walked down the hall, down the stairs to the auditorium lobby, and out the door, headed for the 7-11 to get some sodas and 2-for-$1 donuts. Our friendship consisted mostly of idle conversation about cars, TV shows, music, and the other usual things on similar convenience store runs. It didn't sound like much, but we shared a sense of humor and we'd been through a lot together since middle school. I was the only one who knew the juicy details of his relationship with Emily.

It had started years ago, when she'd been part of our circle. She'd fit in with us because the supposedly-popular kids found her annoying, probably because she shared our juvenile proclivities back then. She had kind of an edge to her back then that earned her keep with us. She always had a story that was disturbing enough to hold our interest. In retrospect, her life seemed properly messed up even at point, but the adult nature of her various escapades only earned her our respect at the time.

To this day, I don't know what John saw in her. I guess she was a bit of an early bloomer physically, but that hardly singled her out. John was the kind of wolf who could've had any one of the prettiest vixens if he'd wanted. But whatever it was, John made the move. He regretted that decision, despite receiving some "benefits," after only a couple of months, when he realized she was totally batshit fucking insane.

John was a good guy, and he could well have been the best thing that had ever happened to her, so I guess it shouldn't have come as a surprise that she was reluctant to let him go. But what nobody had seen coming was exactly _how_reluctant she would be to let him go. Thus began a protracted, two-and-a-half-year breakup process that never really came to a clean end. Even over the summer before our senior year, while John and I were on a lovely beach vacation together, she texted him about another pregnancy scare, this time by a guy named Bobby. He was an annoying little weasel, another social pariah. He hung around the Jamestown High gym, but never actually worked out. He liked to pretend he was on the baseball team. "I should probably tell Bobby," one of Emily's messages read.

"I talked to Emily in French just now," I said once we were out the door.

"Oh, she's back? Shit," John said.

"Well hey, if she talked to me before she went looking for you, I guess that's a good sign. Anyway, you know where she was, right?"

John sighed. "Yup. Mental hospital. Tried to kill herself again."

"How many times is this?"

"Three."

"Jeez," I said. We were quiet for a moment.

"So she talked to you?"

"Yeah, just this morning in French. Told me she met a girl who was, as she said, a 'hardcore coke addict.' Seemed kinda... I dunno, the same, I guess. She seemed happy, though. Or maybe she was just glad to be out."

"Well, that sucks," John said. "It was really nice while she was gone, you know, not having to deal with her."

"I know what you mean."

"Like, I have told her, to her face, 'I don't like you,' and she still doesn't get it."

"You want me to talk to her?" I offered. It wasn't the first time. "She still kind of thinks I'm her friend; maybe I could get through to her better."

"Nah. You don't need to get involved."

"I don't mind if she hates me for it. Hell, in fact, it would be kinda nice for her to leave me alone too," I said in a joke that was just a little too close to home.

"No, I don't think it would do any good anyway. Sammy tried to do that, and the first thing she did was come to me and say, 'Sammy thinks you hate me!'"

"Wow. How'd that go?"

"I was like, 'well, he's kiiiiind of right,' but she didn't believe me."

"Of course. Well, hopefully she'll just transfer to Jamestown already. She has, like, no friends here," I suggested, more optimistically than I felt.

"Yeah, but a lot of people hate her there."

"A lot of people hate her here. And all her friends- Well, all the people she hangs out with go there."

"Yeah, but that means everyone else there knows about all the, uh, stuff she does. She's got kind of a low profile here; it wouldn't be like that at Jamestown."

"Whatever," I said.

"Yeah, let's talk about something else."