Murray and Madison Carlson had fallen asleep together on the fake linoleum floor of the hallway. Murray’s jacket rolled up under Madison’s head, Madison’s hand pressed against Murray’s chest, very little space between them. An interesting development.

Sadie had crashed on the couch with Ryan swaddled at her chest, the both of them resting slack-jawed as their eyes darted from side to side beneath their thin lids.

“Suds,” I whispered as I poked her in the shoulder. “Time to go home.”

“I set the home economics kitchen on fire on purpose,” said Sadie sleepily as she sat up, Ryan still pressed to her chest, her slender fingers supporting his head. “That’s what I’d want redemption for. From my teenage years, anyway.”

“Not for all the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll?” La said as she stretched on her office chair. She looked how I felt: like 90 percent of my blood had been replaced with high fructose corn syrup, caffeine, and cement dust.

“Oh hell no. I don’t want redemption for that. I don’t need redemption for that. The only thing that ever felt wrong was the fire. I don’t think Hotchkiss was ever the same.”

“Mr. Hotchkiss was your home ec teacher?” I said.

“Yeah. Dude loves baking. Like, does it as an actual hobby. But then one day I made these lemon curd cupcakes—you know the ones, Henry—and he gave me an A for them, but I was in a real ‘fuck the patriarchy’ mood and was pissed that Family and Consumer Sciences even existed as a subject, it’s the twenty-first goddamn century, you know . . . so I kind of . . . set the kitchen on fire.” Sadie yawned. “It was the worst thing I did as a teenager. The goddamn worst. I think I saw Hotchkiss’s heart break while he tried to fight the flames.”

“We have spare pages,” Lola said, grabbing a pen and paper and pushing them toward Sadie. “I want to do a spread of handwritten confessions.”

Sadie eyed the writing utensils. “What’s the statute of limitations for arson?” she said, but she didn’t wait for us to Google the answer before she started writing. Ryan woke as she leaned forward.

“Hi, Mama,” he said, touching her face.

“Hey, baby,” she said as she handed the slip of paper back to Lola. “Ready to blow this Popsicle stand?”

Ryan nodded. While Lola and I turned off the lights, they went and waited hand in hand in the dimly lit hall, the both of them chatting quietly about all the things they were going to do tomorrow. Zoo in the morning. Lunch at the park. A sleepover with Daddy while Mommy went to work.

And I thought, as I watched them, about Grace’s accusation the night she’d been drunk at the fair. That I didn’t love the real her, just an idea that didn’t exist anymore, a shadow of who she really was.

I’d loved the legend of Sadie when I was a kid. I’d loved the folklore that murmured around her like fireflies wherever she went. I still did. But I loved this version—the one that saved people’s lives, the one that looked at her tiny son like he was made of bright diamonds, pancakes in bed on Sunday morning, and a thunderstorm after a seven-year drought—even more.

Maybe it was possible to love two different versions of someone at the same time. And maybe, just maybe, some people still wanted redemption for sins they didn’t need absolved anymore.

• • •

Sunday was grueling. I met Lola outside my house at seven a.m., the streetlights burning brighter than the watercolor sunrise. She pushed a large coffee into my gloved hands and said, “Do not speak to me for two hours,” so I didn’t.

We met Jim Jenkins outside Hink’s office. We sat down. Turned on the computers. Tried not to die. Died a lot. My eyes had apparently lost the ability to produce their own moisture, so I spent the morning alternating between abusing my digestive system with mass amounts of Red Bull and rubbing my eyes red raw.

When La was finally ready for human interaction, the first thing she did was show me the cover: a picture of a girl in black and white, a grayscale universe behind her, an exploding supernova where her head should be. It looked like an old penny dreadful novel. Even with THE WESTLAND REDEMPTION splashed across the image in orange letters, I could still tell that the girl had been traced from Grace, a ghostly imitation of her true form.

“I still had photos left over from the shoot you guys did for me. I can use a different model, find someone on Flickr, if you want.”

“It’s perfect,” I told her. “Print it out, tabloid-sized. Let’s stick it up and let everyone see.”

So we did. And they did. The juniors arrived at ten a.m., Buck not long after. And then—curiously—two girls who’d been at Heslin’s party the night before. He’d told them what we were doing here, encouraged them to drop by. Most of the pages were filled by now, except for Lola’s spread of handwritten confessions, which the girls—in their deeply hungover state—thought was a great idea.

They wrote down their sins. They gave them to us. We assured them they would be absolved.

And then another person came. And then another. And then two more. After the eighth person, Lola made a sign that read Confess your sins for absolution and stuck it above a drop box in the hall. Murray got wind of the situation and turned up at lunchtime in a priest costume, complete with holy water, and then proceeded to sit by our makeshift confessional, greeting each wayward soul that came our way. We watched our classmates and friends and strangers from other grades come and go throughout the day as news of what we were doing spread on Facebook.

At five p.m. I asked Lola: “How are we doing for pages?”

She said: “We now only have one spare page.”

I said: “Shit, what are we going to do with that?”

She rolled her eyes and said: “It’s for your redemption, dingbat.”

I said: “Oh.”

And then I looked up at the supernova girl printed in black and white and thought about how, in retrospect, you can see that something is poison from the beginning. Grace had torn me apart and put me back together so many times that I’d started to believe that was what I wanted. A Kintsukuroi relationship, more beautiful for having been broken. But something can only be shattered so many times before it becomes irreparable, just as a piece of paper can only be folded so many times before it cannot be folded any more.