And I'm back! NaNoWriMo is over (and I have triumphed, so there.) Chapter nine is here. Also, I apologize for the note on the last chapter, in which I said that I would return in November. I meant December. And here I am! Nice how that works out. Anyhow, enjoy! And I really, really promise I'll wrap up all the things you guys have been bringing up in the comments. Really. Just not today.

GUILT, Rachel wrote on the back of her history worksheet. She was supposed to be…actually, she wasn't sure what she was supposed to be doing. Probably review questions or something like that. She was fairly certain that she had entirely missed the last five battles of whichever war they were studying. She started to draw one of those stupid word maps that her fourth-grade teacher was obsessed with—an inane web of vaguely related words and definitions and associations—but she stopped.

"Why can't he just be a normal dad?" she whispered into the palm of her hand, which smelled like potato chips and hand sanitizer. "Couldn't he have just yelled?" She crumpled up her paper.

"Are you finished, Rachel?" Mrs. Finley asked, appearing suddenly and alarmingly at Rachel's left shoulder. She was a skinny, gangly sort of woman who had never quite grown into her limbs, and her wild hair and split ends were the source of endless derisive comments from the perfect-haired girls in the corners of the room.

"No," said Rachel. She raised her eyes slowly. "I made a mistake. I need a new paper."

"You know, I always ask that students do their classwork in pencil, but they never liiiisten…" Mrs. Finley singsonged.

"I'm sorry," Rachel muttered. She glanced over at Jake, who was staring at his paper. He looked as if he had been paying even less attention than Rachel had in the past few weeks. Rachel had apologized for her father's idiocy, and generally tried to ignore the whole incident as much as possible.

She spread out her paper again and stared at the word, black and spiky, on the back. If feelings are trying to tell us something, then what does guilt tell me? It sounded stupid even in her head. It was all stupid. Why couldn't he just tell her what guilt meant and get this whole nonsense over with?

But Greg House dealt only in puzzles.

Mrs. Finley returned with the new worksheet, but Rachel hardly looked at it. She kept staring at the word on the page. "Guilt," she whispered to herself, hunched over and looking almost unseeing at the paper. "Guiltguiltguiltguilt," she murmured ,until the word had lost all meaning and she didn't know anymore what she was saying.

She finally wrote a list under the word.

Murder

Betrayal

Lying

Because those were the kinds of things that people felt guilty about, right? She wondered if her father had messed up her moral compass, like a magnet screwing with the needle until it stopped pointing north.

"Damn," Rachel whispered, and she wondered if this was what an epiphany felt like. "Damn," she repeated.

"How's the worksheet going, Rachel?" asked Mrs. Finley, popping up out of nowhere.

Rachel nearly shouted. "Fine," she said. Her voice shook slightly after being startled. "The Civil War was pretty crazy," she added brightly.

"Wasn't it?" said Mrs. Finley dreamily, and walked away.

When Rachel got home, her father wasn't there. This was normal, but she found herself more impatient than usual. She didn't make any of her awful snacks, and she didn't do her homework. She turned on the TV and watched for two long hours, tapping her fingers anxiously on her thigh, until finally the door swung open and her father arrived home.

"Dad!" She jumped up.

"Well hello, Little Miss Sunshine," he said, looking at her warily. "Why so sunny?"

"I figured it out."

"Did you?" he said, in such a way that Rachel couldn't be sure whether he'd understood or not.

"Guilt," she said urgently. "It means you've done something wrong."

He paused, and turned and squinted at her for a very long time. "Close enough," he said, and flashed a grin.

"Wait—" He had already started to walk away. "Wait, Dad! What do you mean, close enough?"

"Well, it's a little moral for my taste, but you've got the gist," he said. "Now do the deed."

She blinked at him. "What?"

He stuck out his tongue at her. Rachel closed her eyes, hoping that she could prevent the image of her father being a child (one too many times) from being imprinted on the backs of her eyelids, but it was unlikely. "You know what," he said. "Go. Do."

"Why don't you ever just say anything?" she called after him as he disappeared into the back bedroom.

But she knew. She called Jake and gave him a stupid excuse. Maybe she didn't even give a reason. If she did, it wasn't a very good one or she would have remembered it. But she did say "You probably shouldn't be my boyfriend anymore," because she was hoping that would be less cliché than the other things she had been considering.

"We can't see each other anymore."

"This is wrong."

"I'm sorry."

She might have had a hard time selling that last one.