Chapter 3 – Consequences

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The journal came back empty.

Timothy handed it to him on the bus on Thursday morning, along with Ashleigh’s completed homework and a not-so-subtle hint about how he was more than capable of carrying the folder home to his brother himself. For the rest of the week, though, Conor continued to run the half-mile between their houses, depositing the little book and his friend’s assignments in a neat stack outside the closed bedroom door.

Each day, he wrote on the left-hand pages of the little leatherbound book, leaving the right-hand ones blank, and each morning he picked it up from Timothy and flipped through them, looking for an answer.

None came.

It was disheartening, but Conor refused to quit. Soon, he was bringing the little book with him to every single class, jotting down a constant stream of thoughts and notes as he dragged himself through the day. Much of what he wrote was trivial—jokes, gossip, doodles of the girls that sat nearby. With a little effort, he found that he could imagine Ashleigh’s responses in detail, the other boy’s expression clear in his mind’s eye. He earned a silent lunch from Mr. Vernon for laughing out loud in the middle of his first science quiz, at a witticism that only he could hear.

It was a poor substitute for company, but it kept the thread of their connection alive, made the other boy’s absence slightly more bearable. At times, the little book made him feel even closer to Ashleigh than he might have, normally—his real friend would have been with him in only two of his seven classes, but the imaginary one could go with him everywhere.

That was small comfort outside of the classroom, though, where things were settling into a tense and unpleasant equilibrium. It didn’t take a vendetta like Eichardt’s to make you a target when the sixth, seventh, and eighth grade bathrooms were just a few steps away from one another and all three grades changed classes at the same time. The teachers poked in their heads often enough to make serious trouble rare, but Conor still had to endure the typical taunts and shoves of the bigger kids, and he only narrowly avoided getting drawn into an actual fight when he stumbled across a trio of bullies during an ill-advised mid-class emergency. The three of them had a sixth grader cornered in one of the stalls, and once again Conor found himself caught between the moral imperative to do something and the sad reality that there were no viable options.

(He raised his hands, backing away slowly, and went back to class. He didn’t bother saying anything to the teacher—by the time any grownup could get there, it would all already be over, and he’d be branded a snitch for no one’s benefit.)

Another time, he lingered too long during a class change, and as he came out of the stall he saw two eighth graders making a surreptitious swap by the sinks, each quickly tucking away whatever the other had handed him. Conor kept his head down and said nothing, but he could feel their eyes on the back of his neck, could not help his shoulders tensing as he washed his hands and left.

There were some bright spots to the chaos—Josh Miller, an eighth grader from Conor’s neighborhood, stole an eight-pack of crayons from the art room and took to holding one casually in his hand each time he walked down the hallway of the electives building, so that over the course of a week, a crooked rainbow slowly appeared at waist height on the whitewashed cinderblock. Mr. Sykes was furious—Conor overheard him berating the teacher on hall duty, demanding that she explain how another two lines had materialized during the hour he’d been away patrolling the high school.

(It wasn’t as though Josh was hiding. He had greeted Conor with a grin and a wave, had gestured toward his outstretched arm and said out loud that he was “just doin’ a little vandalism.” Everyone saw. Everyone knew.)

Overall, though, things were not pleasant. One day the bathroom was covered in what looked like half a dozen entire rolls of toilet paper, unwound and soaked, a sagging spiderweb of pulp. Another, he heard soft, wet noises coming from a locked stall and bent over to see two pairs of legs, one kneeling. Once, his foot sent something tumbling on the sidewalk just outside the cafeteria, and on closer inspection, it was a metal spoon, folded back onto itself and scorched black on one side.

The hazing, too, was harsher than he remembered, perhaps a byproduct of the tension in the high school, where the covert war against the Central students had splintered into a murky free-for-all as Bulldog solidarity waned. Conor went back to eating lunch with Ashleigh’s fan club after he had his chocolate milk poured into his mashed potatoes, and he had to lend his Spanish homework to Sam Marlin when the other boy’s locker was broken into and trashed.

(“Why you?” he had asked. Sam had shrugged.)

Things were going especially poorly for Timothy, who was clearly suicidal and continuing to provoke Eichardt at every turn. The older boy hadn’t tried anything on the bus since the second day, but he seemed to have memorized Timothy’s schedule, Nicholas quietly confirming at lunch that the bully was popping up outside of the other boy’s classes every time the bell rang.

At first, Conor tried doing the same, but Timothy gave him such looks of withering fury that he quickly stopped. Instead, he watched from a distance as the sixth grader’s clothes and possessions began to show signs of abuse, and his face hardened into a permanent scowl. From time to time, Conor overheard him spitting contemptuous poison at Eichardt in the courtyard, in the hallways, outside of the cafeteria—any time when there were too many witnesses for the eighth grader to respond with violence. But each of those fleeting victories was followed by a savage round of private retribution—by the middle of the second week, the younger boy had had to buy a new uniform, and had quit carrying a lunchbox altogether.

It was a jarring rhythm, in and out of danger, the high alert of the hallways and the stultifying safety of the classrooms. Conor could see it in the bearing of his peers—he wasn’t the only one whose shoulders visibly relaxed each time he passed through a doorway and out of the jungle, only to slump into exhausted semiconsciousness five minutes later when the adrenaline wore off.

Math was by far the worst—Mrs. Atkins was by no means cruel, but she could only circle the room so many times before fairness compelled her to call upon Conor, and it seemed distinctly unpromising that his answers confused her every bit as much as her questions confused him. Their first major test was coming up soon, and Conor couldn’t decide whether to bury himself in the textbook or write it off as a lost cause. He had briefly considered copying Ashleigh’s homework, then decided against when he realized that even the other boy’s C-level work would be implausible, coming from Conor himself.

The other classes were not quite so bad—in Science, Social Studies, and electives, he was meeting with his usual mixture of modest success and acceptable failure. But he still found it hard to look forward to any of them with anything like enthusiasm.

The sole exception was first period English. Ms. Palmano’s class was turning out to be the strangest one he’d ever been in. After their first discussion, she hadn’t spoken a word for two days straight, except to crack down on a pair of girls who’d come in chattering and been too slow to settle down.

(She had sent both of them straight to the office without so much as a warning, paying no heed to their protests, and the room had been deadly silent for the rest of the period.)

On Thursday, she had taken up their papers, put tape over their names, and passed them back out, so that each student held someone else’s anonymous work. They spent that day and all of Friday reading them aloud, one at a time, ignoring by tacit agreement the sudden and involuntary twitch of a classmate recognizing their work. The papers had varied wildly in topic, length, and style; throughout the recitation, Ms. Palmano had sat unmoving at her desk, a look of polite attentiveness fixed on her face.

Once the last piece had been shared, she had taken the papers back, gathered them into a neat stack, and dropped them into the trash. “Terrible,” she had said into the shocked silence, wiping her hands theatrically. “Unpublishable, across the board.”

As on the first day, reactions had been mixed. But the outraged students had been truly outraged, some of them actually leaping up out of their seats as they shouted their objections. It had taken Ms. Palmano a full thirty seconds to make herself heard over the clamor.

When she finally did, though, her response was devious. “Any student who disagrees with my evaluation is welcome to have me take a second look,” she’d said. “Simply identify which paper belonged to you, and we’ll go over it publicly, for everyone’s benefit.” At that, the shouters had abruptly recanted, their complaints trailing off into seditious grumbles (although Jennifer and a boy named William who sat in the front row had both seemed close to taking her up on it).

That had been the end of Friday’s class, and on Monday of the second week, they had come in to find laminated speeches and essays spread throughout the room, taped to the desks. The words READING REQUIRES SILENCE had been written on the board, and they had spent the period rotating from one seat to the next, poring over the words of Confucius and Alexander, Mandela and Churchill, Jesus and Socrates and Sun Tzu and Swami Vivekananda. Most of it was utterly incomprehensible to Conor, and his classmates didn’t seem to be doing much better—the indifferent ones were clearly daydreaming, and many of the nerdier ones were on strike. But he copied a handful of good quotes into the journal, and he managed to make it all the way through Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which was the shortest piece. The entire time, Ms. Palmano sat behind her desk, ignoring them completely as she thumbed through a tattered paperback novel.

Strangely, Conor felt encouraged rather than frustrated by her offhand discourtesy. Partly it was because he felt none of the fear and outrage his more scholarly classmates were feeling—he was, after all, making an inoffensive 85. Partly it was because he enjoyed watching those same classmates get cut down to size—Ms. Palmano had affirmed what he’d always secretly believed, that while his own writing was admittedly awful, theirs wasn’t really any better.

But mostly, he liked it because it had the ring of pure truth. There were no euphemisms, no careful tiptoeing around people’s feelings. She talked to them as if she were a kid herself, unafraid to judge and even less afraid to pronounce those judgments. For as long as Conor could remember, grownups had bent over backwards to hide their real opinions, blurring the boundary between good and bad with an almost frantic desperation—No, no, it’s great, I love it!

Ms. Palmano, though, had reintroduced the sharp dividing line, driving the two sides apart once more. That she had placed all of them on the bad side was almost trivial, by comparison—what mattered to Conor was that she was willing to acknowledge the difference at all, wasn’t cringing and placating and scared to talk straight. It was a backhanded kind of respect, and it reminded him of Ashleigh, somehow.

Plus, she winked at me.

That hadn’t meant anything at all, of course, but it stuck in his mind. Out of everyone in the room, he had been the first to get it, that first day—to figure out the game that she was playing, and make a move in response. He might not have any special aptitude for reading or writing, but he knew how to recover after being thrown off balance, and if the first week was anything to go by, that was going to count for something, in this class.

And so it was that on Tuesday of the second week, he entered first period feeling almost eager, ready to participate. But there were no instructions on the board, and no papers on the desks, and the usual pre-class quiet had a nervous, apprehensive feel to it, their teacher’s expression dark and dangerous.

She must have been counting them as they came in through the door, because with half the class still on its feet, she strode over and closed it with a sharp click. “I thought,” she said, filling the sudden silence, “that we might start today with a bit of candor. You see, some of you tried to get me fired last night, and I think it’s best we clear the air before going any further.”

Her tone was light and casual, not matching her face at all, and so it took an extra heartbeat for the words to sink in, after which the air in the room turned to ice.

“Oh. Guess I’m not supposed to say that, am I? Unprofessional. I’m supposed to pretend like nothing happened, and if I know which students were behind it, I’m definitely not supposed to let it influence the way I treat them for the next—what is it, hundred and seventy-four class days. Right?”

There was a thick, uncomfortable silence as most of the students tried looking anywhere other than straight ahead. Conor exchanged a glance with Holt, who jerked his head subtly toward William. He was sinking slowly in his seat, his cheeks scarlet.

“Maybe I should back up, since only four of you actually know what I’m talking about.” Ms. Palmano leaned against the empty dry erase board, arms crossed. “The other day, I did something that took a lot of you by surprise. I took your papers—which you had worked on for four whole hours, gosh—told you that they weren’t good enough, and put them in the trash.

“Of course, I didn’t actually throw them away. That was a bit of theater on my part.” Following her nod, they saw a neat stack of papers sitting on the corner of her desk. “But since I never intended for you to have them back, let’s say I don’t hold it against you if you bought the act.”

She smiled tightly. “Now, I expected a certain amount of blowback, which is why I cleared my plan with our dear principal three weeks ago. He’s fairly old school—still argues we should bring back paddling—and so he got it right away. But being old school, he was surprised at the vehemence of the complaints he received. If you don’t know the word ‘vehemence,’ you should look it up later—it’s got an ‘h’ in it.”

She paused, as if expecting—what? But no one moved. No one spoke.

She continued. “Four sets of parents all called within the same hour, demanding I be fired on the spot. Well, seven in total—I did the same thing with all of my classes. But this class was the only one with so much…solidarity. Our dear principal asked me, what did I do differently with these kids, that their parents were so personally offended? And I said gee, I don’t know—which kids were they?”

There was a slight rustling as heads twisted back and forth. William had now sunk almost below the level of his desk, and in front of Conor, Jennifer had her hands cupped around her eyes like blinders.

“Exactly,” said their teacher. “That’s where it got interesting. Because wouldn’t you know it, every single one of those parents had a kid who’d put themselves in the ‘A’ column.”

She gave another tight, humorless smile. “Then it all made sense. You see, you guys are what we call the ‘higher level’ class. Did you know there are more academically gifted students in here than in any of my other periods? We don’t make a big deal out of it, but it’s true. Which means that this class in particular is made up of a bunch of kids who aren’t used to hearing that their work is…let’s say inadequate.”

She stepped away from the board and began walking slowly up and down the rows of desks, the students leaning away from her as she passed as if she were giving off heat. “The parents, of course, insisted that I had misjudged their brilliant children, that I was a terrible teacher, and that maybe the reason I couldn’t recognize quality work is that I’m unable to produce any myself. Oh, yes,” she said, catching Holt’s strangled laughter. “That one especially made me smile. Because as it happened, I’d already done something that afternoon, in preparation for this week’s lessons: I’d taken every paper that you all had written and typed them out in the same font and format, fixing all the little grammatical errors along the way so that everyone’s words were presented with the same level of polish.

“And guess what? Those very same parents were completely unable to pick their children’s work out of the pile. Only one father managed to do it, and he, at least, was honest enough to admit that he’d already asked his daughter what she’d written about.”

Ms. Palmano stopped at the back of the room, a few feet away from Conor’s desk, turning away from him as she faced the rest of the class, the other students all twisted around in their seats.

“So that put an end to that little episode,” she said. “Needless to say, if you’re going to get me fired, it’s going to take a lot more than that, especially with the county scraping the bottom of the barrel. I really shouldn’t tell you the sorts of things I honestly think I could get away with, so long as I’m, quote, maintaining order, unquote.”

A ripple of unease passed through the class, and Holt’s face turned uncharacteristically grim.

“For the record: I’m not actually the monster some of you were making me out to be. I’m not a sadist and I have no interest in bruising your self-esteem. I’m simply not going out of my way not to.”

She stepped around Conor’s desk and reopened the door to the hallway, leaving it ajar as she strode back up the aisle to her desk. Picking up the top paper from the stack, she began to read aloud.

“’I am writing this paper, which is a dumb paper because you haven’t told us what we’re supposed to do, so I’m going to fail like you said because I can’t think of anything to write. This whole assignment is stupid. I don’t get how you can be a teacher if you don’t even have anything to teach. I thought you are supposed to help us instead of just sitting there but here I am not learning nothing. I wish I was fishing instead of wasting time writing down words until you say enough. If this is what this class is like then I’m going to get an F because it’s a waste of time and it don’t make no sense.’” She lowered the paper. “You all remember hearing this one on Friday, I’m sure. It goes on like that for about a page and a half.”

Setting it back on the stack, she leaned against the board again, fiddling idly with one of the markers as she swept her gaze across the room.

“In case you couldn’t tell, that was not one of the students who put themselves in the ‘A’ category. Our problem is more complicated than that. We’ve got one group that thinks they already know everything, and another that thinks they’re not learning anything. Add to that the kids who feel one way or another but are too polite to say anything, and the ones who just don’t care, and we’ve got maybe three-quarters of the class ready to walk out the door right now. Lucky for you, it’s open.” Raising her hand, she pointed with the marker. “Anybody wants out, now’s your chance.”

If the previous silences had been uncomfortable, this one was downright oppressive. The teacher looked at them. They looked at her—at the door—at each other.

No one spoke.

“You see, I’m not even remotely interested in trying to teach people against their will. It’s barbaric, it’s not what I signed up for, and—incidentally—it doesn’t work. You aren’t babies. If you want out, get out, and let the rest of us get to work.”

Conor’s fingers twitched. The little leatherbound journal was down in the rack under his seat, along with his binder and pencil pouch and second period textbook—he didn’t think it was wise, all things considered, to draw attention to himself by bending down and fishing it out. But there was something there that didn’t feel quite right—some note of confusion, something that had triggered his new habit of writing down anything interesting—

It was Holt who summoned the courage to speak first.

“What happens if we leave?”

“Not my department,” the teacher said, shrugging. “Whatever usually happens to kids who walk out in the middle of class, I guess. Detention.”

“That’s not fair!” Jennifer blurted.

“What’s not fair about it?”

“You aren’t even giving us a choice!”

“I’m sorry—was I supposed to? Did any of your other teachers offer you a choice?”

“None of them told us we should leave and then said we’d get in trouble if we did.”

“I never said you should leave. I told you that you could, if you wanted to. And that was already true—me acknowledging it didn’t make it possible all of a sudden. You can do whatever you want. But all else being equal, your best bet is to stay right where you are.”

“Then what was that whole lecture about?” Holt demanded.

“I thought it was pretty clear—I was clarifying your options.”

“What options? You still didn’t give us a choice!”

“Aren’t you listening? You already have a choice—stay, or go.”

“But that isn’t a choice. We have to stay. Those are the rules.”

Ms. Palmano opened her mouth to reply, then hesitated, a frown working its way down from her eyebrows. “Maybe we need to back up,” she said. “There’s a fairly basic point that you’re not getting, here.” She shifted her stance, turning away from Holt and addressing the class as a whole. “How many of you are here at school because you want to be?”

Several glances were exchanged before a scattering of hands rose hesitantly into the air. Conor’s and Holt’s were not among them.

“And how many of you would rather be somewhere else?”

The hands fell, replaced by a dozen more.

“Okay, those of you with your hands up—where would you be, if you didn’t have to be in this class right now?”

A sudden impulse seized Conor. “Fishing,” he called out.

There was a little laughter, and as Ms. Palmano smiled, the temperature in the room came up a degree or two from freezing. “All right, Conor, since you volunteered—”

Aw, crap.

“—what is it, exactly, that’s keeping you from going fishing right now?”

“Aren’t…you?” he answered, already regretting his decision to speak. He could feel the pressure of his classmates’ attention like a physical weight across his shoulders.

Rule two, rule fucking two, there’s only five rules and you forgot the second one—

“From all the way over here? You’re right next to the door—what am I going to do, use the Force?”

More laughter. Conor shifted self-consciously in his seat. “You could call the front office.”

“True. But by the time anybody got here, you’d be long gone, wouldn’t you? I mean, how long does it take to get off campus from here, two minutes? Half that, if you run.”

Tell her you could do it in thirty seconds if you go over the wall.

“The point is,” Ms. Palmano continued, “there isn’t actually anything stopping you. No guards, no chains, no barbed wire fences. If you wanted to leave, you could. But you haven’t. Modus tollens—logically, you must not want to.”

“Otis what?” Holt interjected, triggering another round of giggles.

Conor didn’t laugh. He was beginning to grow frustrated—she was toying with him, twisting things around so that his answers kept coming out wrong. “What are you trying to get me to say?” he asked, an edge of anger creeping into his voice. “That I don’t—that I’m wrong about what’s inside my own head?”

Ms. Palmano’s gaze sharpened. “Would you rather be fishing?” she asked quietly. “Because I can think of two good creeks in walking distance. Three, if you’re willing to skip second period, too. Or do you prefer to stay in class?”

“I prefer not to get grounded!”

“Bingo!” Throwing him a mock salute, Ms. Palmano turned back to the rest of the class. “I hate to sound like a self-help book, but the first step in taking control of your life is realizing that you already have it. Conor wants to go fishing, but he wants to stay out of trouble more—so he stays in his seat even though there aren’t any chains. He could get up and leave, but he knows I’d call the office; he could outrun the AP, but he knows we’d call his parents; he could run away from home, but it just isn’t worth it. So he chooses to follow the rules. He chooses—not his parents, not me, not the police or the president. Just him.”

She began to pace. “Unless you’ve been kidnapped, hypnotized, and put under direct control by the government or aliens or the Wicked Witch of the West, no one has ever made you do anything. Never. Not once. The most they’ve done—the most anybody can do—is limit your options. Make certain choices so attractive or unattractive that you’re overwhelmingly likely to pick the one they want. But even then, there’s nothing to stop you from going the other way. Somebody could put a gun to your head, and if you had a good enough reason, you’d still tell them no.”

She turned and began writing on the board. When she finished, she capped the marker and moved aside so they could read:

“There has never been a slave who did not choose to be a slave.
Their choice may be between bondage and death,
but the choice is always there.”

“Free will, kids. Whether you admit it to yourself or not, you’re here at school because you want to be—or at least, you unwant it less than you unwant all the other options. That’s how human beings work—we always pick whichever option looks best. Coming to class every day nets you the lowest possible amount of pain and suffering—although given how hard some of you tried to get me fired, maybe you’re reconsidering.” She smiled humorlessly, and the sinking boy twitched.

Conor frowned, feeling oddly unbalanced, as if he was up on the roof and the wind was blowing. He wanted to object—but he didn’t want to speak—but what she was saying was wrong—wasn’t it?

But he couldn’t put his finger on how, exactly—

“Holt was only halfway right,” Ms. Palmano continued. “The rules do say you have to stay, but the rules by themselves can’t make you do it. Rules and laws don’t control people—they just convince people to control themselves, by setting the price for misbehavior. Want to go ninety on the highway? Fine—but it’s going to cost you five hundred bucks every time you get caught. For some people, that’s a fair trade, and they take the risk. Other people have to get by on a public school teacher’s salary, so they can’t even afford a car that goes that fast. It's all a question of what you want, and how much you’re willing to pay.”

She turned back to the board and added a third line beneath the quote:

THERE IS ALWAYS A PRICE.

“That’s what this lecture is secretly about. Because, see, you don’t just pay for the bad stuff. You have to pay for the good stuff, too. Robbing a bank might cost you twenty years of your life, but so does becoming a neurosurgeon. And some of you have been trying to get a free ride—you’re not willing to pay the price for skipping class, but you haven’t paid the price of taking class, either. You’re dozing off in the back, or you’re writing passive-aggressive essays, or you’re going home and complaining to Mommy and Daddy that your mean old teacher hurt your precious feelings.”

Leaning back against the board, she crossed her arms again. “It’s not going to fly. I let it slide for the first week, but the petulant little kid act has to stop. There have been kings younger than you—I don’t think you need your parents to fight your battles for you. Get off the fence, stop dragging your heels, decide whether you’re in or out because those of us who are here to get things done don’t need the rest of you slowing us down.”

Silence reigned as she pointed to the door once more. For several long seconds, the class held its breath. Then—

“What about what we want?”

It was Jennifer again, and her voice was laced with indignation. Conor couldn’t see her face, but the rest of the class could; she had stopped hiding behind her hands and now sat rigidly in her seat, arms crossed, a mirror image of the woman at the front of the room.

“Pardon?” Ms. Palmano replied, arching an eyebrow.

“You keep going on about prices and payment and stuff, but you haven’t said what we’re paying for. You’re saying we have to cooperate, but you haven’t given us any good reasons to, except that you’ll throw us out if we don’t. You sound like some kind of crummy stepmom trying to bully us into doing extra chores. Why should we say yes? What do we get out of it?”

“An education.”

“But you’re not teaching us anything! All you’ve done so far is throw out our papers and insult us!”

“And what did you learn from that?”

“That you’re a total jerk and you should be fired!”

Jennifer’s tone had risen with each exchange and was now not far from being a shout. A shiver moved outward from her desk like the shockwave from an explosion, leaving behind expressions of horror, trepidation, admiration, glee. Conor glanced across the aisle at Holt, whose face was surprisingly still, and thoughtful.

Ms. Palmano shook her head. “You say ‘total jerk’ like it’s a bad thing.”

“It is a bad thing! You’re supposed to help us, not treat us like dirt!”

“I am helping you. This is lesson number one, and I’m sorry, but I don’t know any non-harsh way to do it. I’m trying to unravel six-plus years of propaganda and we don’t have a lot of time.”

“You threw my paper in the garbage.”

“And you left the room without fishing it out.”

There was another collective rustle as half the class let out a breath.

Point, whispered Ashleigh.

“Because you would have—”

“Stop. Be honest, and by ‘be honest’ I mean actually check, inside your own head. Did you really, actually not fish it out because you expected the price to be too high? Like, you thought about it, and decided not to? Or did it literally not occur to you as an option? This is a question for all of you, to be clear—not just Jennifer.”

There followed a confused, awful silence.

“Of critical note,” Ms. Palmano said, and her voice was softer, now—gentler, more human. “I threw your papers away. Not you. The difference matters. If you’re not able to separate yourself from your work, then you won’t be able to separate yourself from your failures, and that means you’ll never be able to move past them. If you can’t admit even the possibility that maybe your paper really was that bad—”

“You can tell us our writing needs work without making us feel bad.”

“Not if your self-esteem is all wrapped up in being one of the smartest kids in seventh grade.”

Oof.

Jennifer blushed, looking down at her desk.

Their teacher’s voice softened still further. “Look. I appreciate your point, Jennifer—I really do. And for what it’s worth, I think we only have to do this once. I think—maybe—that now I can tell you your writing needs work without having to make you feel bad, first. But sooner or later, this is where we were going to end up. Maybe there was a way I could have done this more gently, brought you all to this point more slowly, but I’m not sure, and even if I could—by the time we finally got here, it would have been a month’s worth of work, instead of just four days. Four hours, really.”

She shook her head, turning to address the whole class once more. “I’m sorry,” she said flatly. “And honestly, you don’t have to forgive me. But what you have to understand—what apparently half of you have never been told before—is that no matter how good you get, you are always capable of failure. Of producing work that is completely and utterly worthless. Your first try was bad. So what? That’s what second tries are for. Some of you really are decent writers—already—but that doesn’t mean that what you wrote last week was quality. You have to break out of the trap of thinking that everything you make deserves to be on the refrigerator.”

She turned her gaze back to Jennifer. “What I’m about to say—well, if it makes you even angrier, so be it. But. Putting your paper in the trash was a compliment.”

Something happened on faces that Conor couldn’t see, and Ms. Palmano held up her hands. “I know! I know, okay? I know it wasn’t very nice, but—it means I believe you are genuinely capable of something better. If I had really wanted to insult you, I would have told you to be proud of it.”

Like every other teacher ever.

She held Jennifer’s gaze, waiting. Around them, the other students looked thoughtful, pensive. Here and there a defiant attitude still showed in a pair of crossed arms or a furrowed brow, but gone were the outraged objections of five minutes ago.

Conor lowered his eyes to the desk, trying to untangle his own thoughts. She had—she was fighting with Jennifer. Had actually fought with her, like an equal, instead of doing the thing that grownups usually did—

Ah.

Conor raised his hand.

“Mmmm?”

“If it was up to you—like, all the way—would you call the office on us, if we left?”

“It’s not up to me.”

The answer was prompt and unhesitating.

Conor bit his lip. “But if it was.”

The teacher shook her head. “It isn’t,” she repeated. “And that part’s important. It’s important not to dodge it. I could say, oh, of course not, I want everybody to be free, and then you’d all think, gosh, Ms. Palmano’s so nice, she’s one of the good ones, she wouldn’t turn us in if she didn’t have to. But I don’t deserve those points. I don’t have to. I’m right here, participating in this whole machine and very much not destroying it. If you walk out, I will call the office, because the alternative is getting fired, and I’m choosing not to get fired. Yet, anyway.”

“Why?”

She grinned. “Because the next guy would do a worse job,” she said. “I don’t actually get to choose between the world where you’re all trapped in here and the one where you’re not. The system is just too big. But I can try to slip you some extra food through the bars, and I’m pretty sure that’s still better than having a teacher who won’t. Most of them don’t.”

She turned to look at Jennifer once more.

Seconds passed.

Slowly, reluctantly, Jennifer nodded.

Ms. Palmano nodded back.

“I am sorry,” she repeated. “But it feels weird to apologize when I can’t honestly say I’ll do anything different next time.”

She waited, but Jennifer offered no second nod. “Paper and pencils,” she barked, her voice high and sharp once more. She clapped her hands, loudly, twice.

There was a moment of wild disorientation, and then the room filled with noise as they scrambled for their bags and binders. “Your assignment,” she called out, over the sudden tumult, “is to respond to the quote on the board with at least three hundred words. That’s about one sheet of notebook paper, front and back, or one page typed, size twelve. Say anything you like, as long as it’s interesting and relevant—a successful paper is one that you’re not embarrassed to read aloud and that your classmates aren’t bored to listen to. Bring your first three sentences up to me; I want to make sure you’re on a good track before you waste too much time.”

By the time she finished talking, the room was still again, with no sound except the scratching of pencils. All around Conor, students were squinting up at the board, jotting down the pair of sentences.

Conor looked at the words.

He looked down at the paper he’d placed on the desk, and the little leatherbound journal, open and intimidating.

He looked over at his teacher.

What?

It was Ashleigh’s voice, in his head.

I don’t know, he answered honestly.

Then he stood, and followed his feet to the front of the room.

“Finished already?” Ms. Palmano asked, as he approached her desk.

“No,” Conor said. “I—”

He broke off. Now that she was sitting and he standing, their eyes were nearly level, with her looking slightly up at him. She had a faint constellation of freckles across the smooth skin of her nose and cheeks that he hadn’t noticed before.

“The, um. The quote,” he stammered, casting about for something to say, some plausible justification for being there—

Rule fucking two?

“I was wondering—you didn’t write—who said it?”

She studied him for a long moment, and he managed—barely—not to squirm.

“I imagine it’s the sort of thing that’s been said a lot of different ways by a lot of different people,” she answered carefully. “This particular version came from a fantasy book, though. Forgive me, but if I recommended it to a seventh grader I think they really would fire me.”

Conor blinked.

“Anyway, it wasn’t said, exactly. It was a thought. The person thinking it had been a lord, but his family fell from power, and he ended up being sold as a slave a thousand miles away from home.”

Conor glanced at the board. “Is he still—I mean, did he—”

“No. He chose to live.”

“As a slave.”

“Yes.”

Hey, um. What are we doing?

Shhh.

Conor looked back over his shoulder, at his classmates bent over their papers. “You didn’t actually write that up there because of what me and Holt said, did you?” he asked. “You had the assignment planned out already. You…you wanted somebody to argue with you.”

She laughed. “That character said something else you might like—‘Why is it that when one man builds a wall, the next man immediately needs to know what’s on the other side?’” Still smiling, she winked at him, and gestured back toward his seat.

He turned, his mind curiously blank, walking slowly back down the aisle between the desks, past his classmates bent and scribbling. He stepped to one side to let Holt pass, the other boy heading for the front with his first three sentences.

Another wink.

He’d gotten another wink, somehow.

And a special quote, just for him.

Hello?

He wasn’t quite sure what it was he was feeling, as he slipped back into his seat, picked up his pencil. But he liked it.

He wondered what Ashleigh would make of Ms. Palmano, when he finally came back.

•••

Tuesday was pizza day.

Conor broke away from Holt as they left fifth period, threading his way through the crush at a near jog. His locker was in the wrong direction, so he skipped it, tucking his math book and the journal under his arm. He arrived at the cafeteria ahead of all but a few dozen students; in two minutes, he was setting his tray down beside Nolan and Nicholas, who brought lunch from home. Turning his sweatshirt around backwards, he immediately went back for seconds, falling in beside Holt and snagging two more slices of pepperoni as the rest of the crowd rolled in behind them.

They were halfway back to their seats when Conor stopped abruptly, his elbow knocking over Holt’s cup as the other boy swerved to avoid a collision. “Qué carajos, man?” Holt protested, apple juice spreading across his tray. He shot Conor an exasperated look, then fell silent as he followed Conor’s eyes toward the double doors of the cafeteria.

Guyler Stevens had returned.

He was standing near the end of the line, hands in his pockets, his expression hooded. Even from a distance, Conor could see the dark shadow of a black eye above his bandaged nose. A headband stretched across his forehead, covering what was probably another bandage. If his fractured rib was dressed in any way, it didn’t show beneath his uniform.

There was no crowd around him—no circle of friends, no gaggle of gossipmongers. A few of the nearby students were throwing sidelong looks at his face, but for the most part he was simply there, alone and anonymous. Conor watched as he shuffled forward, his movements abbreviated and stiff. There was a rack of clean trays where the line split in two, and he might have winced a little as he lifted one off the shelf.

It wasn’t until Holt’s hand fell on his shoulder that Conor realized he had started forward again. He looked back to see his friend shaking his head. “Not now, dude,” Holt warned.

“I wasn’t—”

“Good. Don’t.” Holt held his gaze for a moment, then jerked his head toward their corner of the cafeteria. “Come on, let’s eat.”

Conor hesitated a moment longer, his eyes flickering back toward the line as Guyler stepped up to the counter with his tray.

Holt’s suspicion was understandable, but misplaced. Conor had no intention of starting anything. What he had was a sudden desire to kick himself—for a week and a half, he’d been struggling to get through to Ashleigh, desperate for answers that (he’d told himself) only Ashleigh had.

But Guyler had been there, too.

Yeah, and I’m sure he’s real eager to sit down and talk it over with you.

I did rescue him. Sort of.

He sighed. Holt was right—this wasn’t the time. Turning, he walked back to his table, where he discovered that he had lost not only his original seat, but also his first two slices of pizza.

“Seriously?” he grumbled, sliding into one of the remaining spaces.

“I traded you,” Holt said, gesturing to his own sodden tray. “Mine’s been marinated in apple juice. People pay extra for that.”

Conor rolled his eyes. Reaching across the table, he grabbed his books, pulling them into his lap as Eddie sat down beside him in the last chair.

As usual, the other boy wasted no time. “Did Jennifer really bitch out your teacher in first period?” he asked, looking eagerly back and forth between Conor and Holt.

Conor closed his eyes and took a deep, fortifying breath.

“They were kind of bitching at each other,” Holt said mildly. “But Jennifer did say she was a jerk, and that she should’ve been fired.” Someone gave a low whistle, and Eddie laughed. “It wasn’t a big deal, though,” Holt continued. “She didn’t even care.”

Nolan’s voice floated across the table as Conor fumbled blindly for a slice of pizza, his eyes still closed. “She must have been pissed, though. Jennifer, I mean. She doesn’t exactly yell.”

“Did her parents really call the principal?” Eddie asked.

“No,” said Holt. “Some people did try to get her fired. But Jennifer wasn’t one of them.”

Conor opened his eyes. “And you know this how?”

Holt looked sheepish. “She, uh. Came to get us, during break. Ms. Palmano. …all four of us.”

“Wait—you? I thought she said they were all in the ‘A’ column.”

“Not me, man, mi madre loca. And I guess she rounded up on the grades thing. Shireen, Katie, and William were all definitely in ‘A’. Anyway, she didn’t say much. Just if we have beef with her again, we could at least try telling her, first.”

“Seems fair,” said Eddie.

“Dunno,” Holt said. “It’s not like she let us get a word in edgewise on Monday. Like, when she actually threw the stuff away. I’m not saying she deserves to get fired, but she was being kind of a jerk, and she hasn’t exactly given anybody a reason to try talking to her first.”

Conor chewed at his lip. She’d been dismissive, sure, but it wasn’t like they’d given her an honest chance to explain, either—they’d all just started shouting. And she had offered to go into more detail…it wasn’t her fault nobody took her up on it…

(The little copy of Ashleigh that lived on Conor’s shoulder perked up, but it didn’t say anything, and neither did Conor.)

The conversation moved on. By the time he finished his first slice of pizza, Holt and Nolan were talking about tryouts for the school soccer team, and Conor let his attention wander, looking out across the crowded tables, searching for—

There.

Guyler Stevens had seated himself at an empty table in the corner, near the row of desks reserved for students on silent lunch. He seemed to be picking at his food more than eating it, one hand propping up his chin while the other idly twirled a plastic fork. Every so often he would look up, his expression flat and unreadable. Conor glanced away each time, vaguely anxious that his interest would be misconstrued.

The third time this happened, Conor’s attention snagged on one of Guyler’s neighbors, a tall, thin boy sitting a few feet away at one of the silent lunch desks. He was holding a book open with one hand, eyes darting back and forth across the pages while the other shoveled pizza into his mouth. There was at once something odd and something familiar about him, and Conor frowned—

Right. He was wearing a uniform, where before he’d been dressed in street clothes, but Conor had seen him before, in the first week of school, when three other students had sent him sprawling to the floor.

Three other high school students. He was a high schooler.

Impossible.

Crossing the boundary between the middle school and high school sides was such a sure and swift path to suspension that students regularly used it to avoid upcoming tests. But there he sat, unmolested, undeniable. Looking more closely, Conor guessed that he was at least sixteen years old—probably a junior.

He turned to look at the staff table—

“Back me up, here, Conor,” said Eddie, derailing Conor’s train of thought. “You and Ashleigh found a whole bag full, didn’t you?”

Horribly wrong-footed, Conor just stared, his jaw hanging open. Several seconds passed, during which the rest of the table looked on expectantly. “I…what?”

Holt laughed. “You been on Mars? No wonder you’re failing math.” He nodded toward Nolan’s brother. “Nick says they busted into Louis Richardson’s locker this morning and found a whole mess of pills in his bag.”

“I still say he must’ve got them from one of the Central guys,” Nolan muttered.

“And I say bull,” Eddie shot back. “Louis was smoking pot out behind the band room all last year. Just because everybody’s worried about the Central guys bringing in drugs doesn’t mean they’re the only ones who have them.”

“Pot’s different from pills,” Nolan argued. “And that’s a lot of drugs. Nobody at Binder has a stash like that. Nicholas said the bag was, like, this big.” He held up his hands.

“Oh, come on,” Eddie said, rolling his eyes. “You’re being—whatchamacallit—naïve. There’s tons of deals going on over on the high school side all the time.” He turned to Conor again. “How big was the bag you and Ashleigh found?”

Conor’s lips moved soundlessly as he struggled to process Eddie’s offhand familiarity with the secret that had dominated his entire summer. “I don’t—I mean, how did—what?” he stammered.

“Oh, knock it off, we’re not gonna tell,” said Eddie. “It was a big one, right? One of those gallon freezer ones.” He rounded on Nolan. “Whole thing, full of pot. I’m telling you, there are, like, legit drug dealers around here. My sister went to this party when she was a junior where people were doing ecstasy in the bathroom. Louis could’ve got that stuff from anybody.”

“Looked to me like they were going to get it from him,” Nicholas put in.

“Either way, point is—”

Eddie broke off midsentence as Conor seized his wrist. “What?” he asked, annoyed.

Conor fought to keep his voice steady, his face suddenly hot. “How do you know about the bag?” he growled, the words striking like flint past clenched teeth.

Around the table, the other boys went still. Eddie frowned and tried to pull his arm away, but Conor held fast.

“What the hell, man?” Eddie protested. “Ashleigh told me—what do you think?” He twisted, wrenching Conor’s elbow, but Conor only tightened his grip, his fingernails biting into the other boy’s skin.

“When?”

“I don’t know, three days ago? Let me go.”

“What? How?”

“What do you mean, how? He just told me. We were talking, and it came up.”

“Talking where?”

“Online. He’s grounded, isn’t he? We were streaming. Get off me.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“Nothing, Jesus,” Eddie snapped. “You going to let me go? Dickhead?” Conor’s fingers twitched, and Eddie snatched his arm back, rubbing at his wrist as the blood began to flow back into his hand. “What the fuck was that about?” he demanded.

Conor didn’t answer, possibly couldn’t have even if he’d wanted to. His pulse was pounding in his ears, and he whirled away, his eyes burning, turning his face in the other direction lest his tears be seen and misunderstood—he wasn’t sad, he was stunned, he was furious, a flood of outrage and betrayal seething under a layer of pure disbelief.

Eddie.

To have waited almost a week and a half with no word—to have run the half-mile and back every afternoon—to have written the other boy page after page after page, unanswered, only to find that Eddie—Eddie!—

It was too much. Dropping his head into his hands, he poured every last scrap of self-control into holding himself absolutely still, praying that the other boys would take the hint, would leave him alone. Not until he heard Holt’s laughter half a minute later did he begin to relax, and even then he held his shoulders level, kept his breathing steady and shallow by brute force, willing himself to be invisible.

Eventually, the bell rang. He could hear the other boys stand, could feel someone lingering—

Holt.

—remained motionless, head bowed, waiting for him to take the hint. Bit by bit, the roar of the crowd diminished, fraying into a collection of smaller, individual sounds, the chatter and clatter of the final stragglers.

Only then did he open his eyes, straightening, finding as he did so that he was not the only one who’d waited for almost everyone else to leave.

For a long moment, he and Guyler Stevens stared at each other across the field of empty tables, each frozen in the spotlight of the other’s gaze. There was nothing meaningful about it—no flash of understanding, no sudden sense of kinship, no urgent unspoken messages. They were simply stuck, neither one able or willing to look away.

Then the moment passed, and Conor picked up his tray and headed for the doors without looking back.

•••

By the time he turned the corner onto Ashleigh’s street, Conor had picked up seven pebbles, three shards of gravel, and two actual rocks. They rubbed together in his pocket as he walked, and every so often, he would reach in and fondle them, letting them spill through his fingers. The largest was always the last to fall, clinging stubbornly to the palm of his hand.

It was almost one o’clock in the morning, and the neighborhood was sound asleep, the light from the streetlamps scattering over sleek hybrids and muscular SUVs, brick mailboxes standing like sentries along the whitewashed curb. Conor padded softly down the sidewalk, his sneakers whispering against the concrete, rehearsing his grievances in his head.

For the first time in days, he had skipped both the run and his afternoon practice session, leaving Ashleigh’s books with Timothy on the bus and closing himself in his room as soon as he arrived home. It had been only ten when his parents went to bed, tiptoeing past his door on their way upstairs, but he’d stayed in his room for another two and a half hours, arguing with himself. In the end, it was the thought of Ms. Palmano that got him up and out the door—her voice had temporarily replaced Ashleigh’s in his head, and he had no answer when she asked him what was holding him back.

There were no signs of life as he turned into Ashleigh’s driveway. A single light shone over the front door, but otherwise, the house was dark. Mrs. Falhanner would be out at her second job; it would be just Ashleigh and Timothy in the house.

The driveway lay in deep shadow, shielded by the corner of the garage and the cluster of trees in the front yard. Conor stopped at the halfway mark, under the old, rusted basketball hoop that Ashleigh’s father had installed the year before he died. Pulling a pebble from his pocket, he looked up at his friend’s bedroom window and took careful aim at the reflection of the moon in the center pane.

The first pebble bounced off the glass with a sound like a snapping twig. Instantly, the dog next door sounded the alarm, its barks unsettlingly loud as they split the still night air. Fighting the urge to hide, Conor kept his eyes locked on the window, waiting for a telltale twitch in the drawn curtains. He counted to thirty, slowly, and then readied his next missile.

Six more times he let fly, and six more times a quiet click was all he got in return. Shortly thereafter the dog lost interest, offering one last growl before going back to sleep. There was an apprehensive quality to the silence that followed, a sense of things waiting to happen. Conor reached into his pocket to feel the stones that still remained—three little, two big.

Rule two.

The news of Ashleigh’s casual betrayal had kindled a fire inside his chest, hardening his resolve, burning through what was left of his patience, his compassion. It was no longer a question of respect, of giving the other boy the space he needed to recover. Whatever confusion or anger Ashleigh might have been feeling, whatever shame had sent him into hiding, he’d obviously had more than enough time to get over it.

Fucking Eddie.

Conor had spent the afternoon playing out the scene in his head, readying his arguments, polishing his comebacks. Little of what he’d imagined saying to his friend was civil, but that was fine—at this point, even bitter words would be better than nothing. They’d had fights before. Fights, they could handle.

Yet as he stood in the driveway, squeezing the remaining stones, their edges sharp against the bruises on his palms, he could not help but be aware of the imbalance in their positions. Ashleigh held the high ground, literally—Conor could force no confrontation without the other boy’s consent. For nearly five minutes, now, he’d stood waiting in the darkness. He’d knocked at the window seven times, with no response.

Maybe—

He swallowed, feeling sick, and forced himself to look.

Maybe silence was all that Ashleigh was willing to give him.

He looked back up at the curtains, hanging slack behind the moonlit glass. It seemed to him that they moved, infinitesimally, as if from the breath of someone standing just behind them—

No. No, that wasn’t it. Ashleigh was still asleep. Conor just needed to make a louder sound, that was all.

It was denial, and on some level he knew it, just as he’d known it under the shed, a few days and a million years ago. But he clung to it, because the list of forgivable justifications for Ashleigh’s behavior was short and growing shorter—

Fucking EDDIE!

—and whatever his reasons for shutting himself away for the past week and a half, a rejection here, now, at one in the goddamn morning—

Conor took a deep, slow breath.

Drawing the smallest chunk of gravel from his pocket, he moved forward until he stood almost directly beneath the window. He threw underhanded, launching the rock straight up, so that it knocked gently against the frame, a soft but solid thunk. Reaching out, he caught it as it fell, took aim and threw again.

Thunk.

On his fifth toss, he thought he saw a flicker of movement, a slight shift in the folds of the curtains. A surge of emotion ran up his spine as he stepped back, letting the rock tumble away into the darkness.

“Ashleigh?” he called out, his voice a hoarse compromise, halfway between a whisper and a shout.

Nothing.

He pulled the second chunk of gravel from his pocket and threw it where he stood. It hit the center pane with an even louder thunk and fell to the driveway. Next door, the dog began to bark again.

In the window, nothing.

Stepping back further, until the moon’s reflection appeared in the window once more, he hefted the third piece of gravel. This time he threw overhanded, lobbing it as gently as he could. There was a loud, echoing crack as it connected with one of the upper panes, and a thin spiderweb of lines appeared, shattering the reflection into half a dozen shards.

The curtains twitched.

This time, he was sure of it—they had pulled apart, and even now hung slightly open, a new sliver of blackness between them. “Ashleigh!” he called again, this time making no effort to keep his voice down.

The curtains closed.

It was as if time had stopped. Or maybe as if it had gone into a loop, the same empty moment repeating itself over and over again, marked by the steady barking of the dog next door. Conor waited, expecting to feel a flash of rage, a wave of grief—something to mark the fact that the two of them had just passed the point of no return.

But there was nothing. Only a distant chill that settled gently over him, leaving him calm and detached.

He put his hand into his pocket, drawing out the last two rocks. They were the size of chicken eggs, with jagged edges and flecks of mica gleaming in the moonlight. He tried to recall his reasons for having them, what he had been thinking when he first picked them up, but he couldn’t remember. Letting the smaller one fall to the ground, he bounced the larger one in his palm and looked to the window.

It’s all a question of what you want, and how much you’re willing to pay for it.

His teacher’s voice in his head was clipped, brusque, and matter-of-fact. Conor couldn’t begin to guess what it was that the other boy wanted. But whatever it was, he was obviously willing to pay for it with their friendship. It had taken almost two weeks, but Conor had finally gotten the message—all that remained was the sending of an appropriate acknowledgement.

He threw the rock.

It crashed into the wooden frame between the panes, splintering it and sending shards of glass into Ashleigh’s bedroom. More glass fell to the driveway, glittering in the moonlight, shattering into dust as it hit the pavement. He watched the curtains as they twitched open, then spun on his heel and stalked off into the night.

•••

It took Conor nearly an hour to get to the school, but only five minutes to reach the auditorium roof. He paced back and forth across it as he caught his breath, kicking aside the stones, recreating the path of sound footing that led up to Binder’s Gap. When he finished, he paused at the edge, looking out at the gymnasium below.

The evidence of his previous landing was still there, the rough gouges casting long shadows in the slanting light of the setting moon. It looked somehow closer, as though the buildings were huddling together in the cold.

Conor was afraid of the dark—always had been. But during the summer he had made an important discovery: it didn’t take an act of bravery to overcome fear, only a sense of purpose. Terror crept in when you let your mind wander—to keep it at bay, you had to become the hunter, the chaser instead of the chased. You never let the darkness sneak up on you—you snuck up on it, and let the rumblings of monsters guide you in for the kill.

Tonight, he was the predator at his peak. The chill that had filled him outside Ashleigh’s house had taken root in his chest as he walked away, leaving no room for doubt or anxiety or fatigue. Restless, he had started to run, and when a wall loomed in his path, he discovered that there was something in him that would not be turned aside. Flowing over and past it, he became Batman—only instead of honing his skills, he was using them, blazing a trail at odd angles to the maze of streets and houses. He climbed fences, pushed through hedges, and jumped creeks until he reached the commercial district, and then he made his way across the rooftops, scrambling up drainpipes and dropping down into dumpsters. He paid no heed to the noise he was making—by the time anyone arrived to investigate, he would be half a block away, shielded by the glare of security lights.

After only a week and a half of running, his stamina was already markedly better. In the hour after he left the driveway, he covered two full miles of up-and-down terrain, and once he reached the school he did the climb in record time, pausing only once, at the bottom of the pipe. Though his forehead dripped with sweat, his breathing was deep and steady as he spun away from the edge and strode to the center of the roof.

He could barely remember the fear and hesitation he’d felt throughout the summer. His limbs tingled with energy, an electric pulse that crackled at his hips and shoulders where it met the ice that filled his center—

(This must be how it felt to be Ashleigh.)

—and try as he might, he could not summon even a shadow of trepidation as he looked ahead to the horizon. There was nothing to it—a quick run, an easy jump, a short flight and a smooth landing. It was physics, momentum—he couldn’t get it wrong if he tried.

The voice of Ms. Palmano echoed in his head. No matter how good you get, you are always capable of failure.

He smiled, a quick tightening of the lips. Yes, that was true. No amount of practice would take chance out of the picture. There were a hundred things that could go wrong—a piece of gravel turning underfoot, a catch of the toe on the raised metal edge, a fatal hesitation or a sudden change of heart. His leg could cramp at exactly the wrong moment, and if it did, he would trip, he would fall, he would die.

But that wasn’t going to happen. Not tonight.

He allowed himself the luxury of a countdown, savoring the penultimate moment. Adrenaline surged through his body—for once pure, untainted by anger or fear. As he took his final breath, the furrow in the gravel seemed to grow, swelling until it filled his vision. He let go and found himself running, his steps so light that they seemed to make no noise at all. Then came the edge—the Gap—the hanging, infinite nothingness—

—and then gravity reclaimed him, drawing him down, down, down to the gymnasium roof.

He landed with a meteoric crunch, feet and hands driving into the gravel like battering rams. Instantly, he tumbled, shedding momentum as he rolled across his back and hip and up onto his feet, still running. He staggered half a dozen more steps before he was able to bleed off the rest of his inertia, sinking to his knees as the world around him spun.

It was life itself, this feeling that welled up inside him. It lit up the ice in his chest like a sunbeam striking a prism. Throwing back his head, he laughed out loud for what felt like the first time in years, letting loose an unbridled whoop that echoed between the empty buildings. Spreading his arms, he collapsed onto his back, looking up at the stars as the sting in his palms grew louder, sharper, realer.

Nothing was different. Nothing had changed. The weight upon his shoulders had not shifted half an inch. But for the briefest, the most fleeting of moments, it had ceased to matter. The pressure had vanished in freefall, and the memory of weightlessness was like a talisman. There were no words inside his thoughts, in that moment, but if there had been, they would have been something like:

There’s a world outside of all of this.

A world where vicious bullies and broken friendships simply didn’t matter, where all of the pain and woe of the past ten days was small and meaningless. A world of places, not of people—of things, and paths, and possibilities.

And in that world—

(The real world.)

—Conor Moreton could fly.