Chapter 5 – Legend

•••

“So, they make us sit in that fucking circle every day, huh?”

Conor smiled faintly as Ashleigh slammed his locker closed and straightened from where he was kneeling on the floor, rebalancing the stack of books in his arms.

“Yeah,” Conor answered. “They don’t even call it homeroom anymore. It’s ‘morning meeting,’ and there’s always some kind of touchy-feely thing.”

“We had to write down something we thought nobody knew about us on a little piece of paper and drop it in a hat,” Ashleigh grumbled, as they began making their way down the packed hallway toward first period English. “Then everybody tried to guess who was who.”

“Us too. Michael has a glass eye. Nobody noticed. What’d you say?”

“Pet fox,” Ashleigh said. “Classy. Believable. Keep ’em guessing.”

“Anybody peg you for it?”

“Bell rang before it came up.”

They joined the line of kids waiting outside Ms. Palmano’s classroom.

“What’s this one like?” Ashleigh asked.

“Don’t fuck with her.”

The other boy raised his eyebrows. “Oh?” he said. “That an order?”

Conor shook his head. “For real. Don’t fuck with her, you’ll regret it. She went off on Meredith and it was scary. She doesn’t play fair.”

“Meredith,” Ashleigh said, his tone skeptical.

“I warned you,” Conor said. “Don’t expect backup if you start something you can’t finish.”

The stack of books fell to the floor as Ashleigh clutched at his own chest with both hands, a look of mock betrayal spreading across his face. “Abandoning me…for a teacher?” he gasped.

“Shut up,” Conor said, nettled. Together the pair of them bent down and began gathering up the scattered books. “I like this class, okay? She’s good. Better than Mr. Marowitz, even. I’ve got a B right now. I don’t want to mess around just because.”

“Oh, I get it,” Ashleigh said, peering ahead as the door opened. “It’s all becoming clear to me now. It’s boobs, isn’t it?”

Conor gritted his teeth, fighting back a surprisingly powerful wave of irritation. Ashleigh’s irreverence—the casual irrelevance of it—

What? That’s how we talk.

But that was the problem. The ease and ignorance with which the other boy had set his sights on their teacher was a spotlight on the gulf between them, a glaring reminder that they had just unshared a pivotal stretch of personal history. Things weren’t—they weren’t normal, they were different now—and Ashleigh should be different, in response—

But he couldn’t be. He hadn’t been there. Had been gone for two full weeks, lacked the context to even recognize how much he didn’t know.

It’s like talking to Eddie.

He followed the other boy on autopilot as the line began to move, then bumped into him as he came to a dead stop just inside the doorway. Someone else ran into Conor from behind—

“Don’t stop and gawk,” came Ms. Palmano’s voice. “Get in and get out of the way.”

The traffic jam dissolved.

Inside the classroom, the neat rows of forward-facing desks were gone, replaced by two long ranks on either side, facing each other like bleachers on a soccer field. Atop each desk was a sheet of paper, annotated in red. The center of the floor was clean and empty, the handful of seats that hadn’t fit along the walls clumped together near the back, giving the whole setup the look and feel of a stage.

“Find your résumé and have a seat,” Ms. Palmano said. She was standing at her usual post at the front, watching them as they fanned out and began searching.

Conor glanced briefly at Ashleigh, who shrugged and made a beeline for their teacher. Turning, Conor found his own paper almost immediately, on a desk just a few feet from his usual spot. The ever-present 85 was circled in red at the top, along with what had proven to be Ms. Palmano’s most frequent note—the letters NSNB, meaning not special, not bad.

He settled into his seat, noticing as he did so that Holt, William, and Jennifer had all found their papers on the same side. Looking up, he saw Ashleigh waiting in silence as Ms. Palmano scanned the résumé he’d completed as homework. She spoke to him briefly, then handed the paper back to him, pointing toward a desk on the opposite side of the room, directly across the central space from Conor.

It could have been Conor’s imagination, but he thought he saw a slight ripple of hostility as Ashleigh walked down the row—a tightening of lips, a barely noticeable shift as students already seated leaned back in their chairs. Their eyes seemed to linger on the other boy just a little bit more than usual, and a few of them threw furtive looks at Conor, their eyes flickering away when he tried to meet them.

Guyler.

The other boy’s speech had clearly gone onto the grapevine. How that would ultimately play out, Conor had no idea.

He turned toward the board, looking for the instructions Ms. Palmano usually left there. There were none, but the blurbs from the previous lesson had been rewritten in a corner in smaller lettering. Beneath them were two neat lines of text; squinting, Conor was just able to make them out:

THEMISTOCLES OF ATHENS
HUANGDI, THE YELLOW EMPEROR

The-mist—no—them-is-toc—

He shook his head. Athens—that was either Greece or Rome, and Hua-whatever sounded pretty Chinese. There was nothing else written on the board, no obvious hints in the rest of the room.

Ms. Palmano began to speak, her voice cutting off the low chatter as if it were a switch. “I have divided you into two groups based on one very specific principle,” she said, without preamble. “Your first task for today is to figure out what that principle is.”

Conor and Ashleigh exchanged a look across the empty floor as the rest of their classmates took stock. There was no immediately obvious pattern—there were boys and girls on both sides, smart kids and dumb kids, a mixture of heights and weights and races.

Holt raised his hand. “Do we get a hint?”

“Are you sure that’s how you want to phrase that?”

Holt lowered his hand.

Another girl raised hers. “Can you give us a hint?”

“Yes.”

An expectant silence, followed by groans and grumbles as the realization sank in.

“Grades?” William asked, hastening to clarify: “I’m asking us, not her.”

A moment’s discussion ruled out grades.

“Could it be something with the alphabet? Last names, maybe?”

Also no.

“Stop guessing and think,” Ms. Palmano said.

Rami spoke up, from the far side of the room. “Our résumés.”

Ms. Palmano winked, and something inside Conor bared its teeth.

Thirty-five chins dropped downward, thirty-five pairs of eyes scanning the papers in front of them for anything that might resemble a clue.

Jennifer raised a hand. “Can we look at each other’s papers?”

“No,” said Ms. Palmano. “Too slow. And that’s one of your two questions for today—”

Jennifer winced.

“—but you’ve earned an extra question for coming up with a solid idea, so you still have two. Let’s try this.”

She reached into her desk drawer, pulling out two boxes of dry erase markers, one red and one blue. “Everyone on this side of the room, pick an item off your résumé and write it on the board on this side of the line, in blue. Everyone on that side of the room, same thing but in red. See if putting them all side-by-side helps you make sense of things.”

There was the usual moment of hesitation as they all waited for someone else to step up first, and then Holt and William broke the ice, followed quickly by the rest of the class. Space around the board soon proved to be the bottleneck, and Conor and Ashleigh came together at the back of the crowd as their classmates wrote up their accomplishments two by two.

“So,” Ashleigh remarked, his voice low. “Everybody’s acting scared.”

“Told you.”

“You know this makes me want to try something even more, right?”

Conor shrugged. “Your funeral.”

They shuffled forward. The red list was filling up faster, its entries trending shorter on average. At the top was Juggled four eggs, followed by 12 point buck, compared with All-county first chair clarinet and Published article in Binder Review, Community section in blue. As Conor watched, a girl whose name he couldn’t remember finished writing Toght myself gitar and handed the red marker to Ashleigh.

The sound of a brisk double knock drew Conor’s attention away, and he turned along with most of his classmates as the door to the room swung open, revealing the solemn, unsmiling figure of their assistant principal.

There was a collective stiffening as Mr. Sykes entered, sharing a curt and professional nod with Ms. Palmano and proceeding silently to the row of chairs at the back of the room. No one spoke. The students watched with bated breath as the grey-haired man settled himself in one of the chairs and—either heedless of the apprehension his sudden appearance had caused or simply used to it—pulled out a tablet and began to tap quietly.

Conor turned, hoping to catch Ashleigh’s reaction, but the other boy was already stepping away, heading back toward his seat. Taking a marker, Conor shifted his eyes to the board—

He stopped short, his entire body freezing in place.

There, in the red column, right at the bottom in Ashleigh’s tight, blocky capitals, was a single sentence:

I CAN JUMP FROM THE AUDITORIUM TO THE GYM.

Dumbfounded, Conor actually reeled—had to take a small step backwards to avoid losing his balance. Someone—he didn’t even register who—finished writing and made space for him at the board. He stood gaping for long seconds, until Ms. Palmano’s gentle cough penetrated his astonishment and he realized that he was the last one, alone at the front of the room.

Fumbling with the marker, he scribbled something, anything, who even cared what, it didn’t matter. Dropping the marker back into the tray, he lurched back to his desk, only thinking to actually look for Ashleigh once his brain no longer had to devote all its spare power to keeping him upright.

The other boy was sitting slightly hunched, fingers laced together under his chin as he eyed Mr. Sykes warily. His expression was one of sudden sobriety and second thoughts, and Conor realized that he must have written his line before registering the presence of their AP.

Conor wasn’t the only one looking. Though Mr. Sykes himself seemed utterly indifferent, the rhythm of his tapping steady and unbroken, at least a quarter of the class had made the connection between Ashleigh and his entry, and many of them were nudging their neighbors, pointing and whispering. Three desks down, Holt was unsubtly trying to catch Conor’s eye.

Conor didn’t want to look at Holt, though. He didn’t want to see Holt, or hear from Holt, or spend one single scrap of energy dealing with whatever worries Holt had about whatever he imagined Conor was feeling. It was not Holt’s job to care about Conor’s feelings, do anything about them. That was Ashleigh’s job, and it was toward Ashleigh that Conor directed all of his attention, as if he could force the other boy to acknowledge him through sheer mental pressure.

Look at me, Ashleigh.

Look at me.

God dammit, LOOK at me.

Ms. Palmano gave a second cough. “I believe we were looking for a pattern?” she said, eyebrows arched.

Gradually, begrudgingly, the class refocused.

(Most of them. Conor’s eyes stayed fixed on Ashleigh.)

“Is it, like, school stuff versus sports stuff?” hazarded David.

“No, look, it can’t be—soccer shows up on both sides.”

“I’ve got it! Half of us wrote in red, and the other half wrote in—”

“Shut up, Holt.”

That was a secret, Ash.

“Maybe the blue side is, like…jobs? And the red side is more hobbies?”

“—just for fun—”

“—you can get paid to juggle, though—”

A secret, and it belonged to both of us.

“It’s got to be something simple.”

“She didn’t say simple, she said specific.”

It belonged to me. All you did was spot it. I’m the one who got us up there. I’m the one who did it.

“There’s no pattern. She’s messing with us again.”

“There’s totally a pattern. Look—blue is stuff your parents want you to do, and red is stuff you want to do.”

You have no right. You can’t—you haven’t even—you wouldn’t have even made it up there without me. You’re just giving it away and it’s mine.

Mine.

“Doing what you’re told,” said Ashleigh.

Preoccupied though they were, most of the students had left some small scrap of attention tied to Ashleigh’s corner, and when he spoke, they noticed, their heads twitching toward him as though tugged by strings, the other chatter falling away.

“Go on,” said Ms. Palmano, her voice carefully neutral.

“All the stuff on the blue list,” Ashleigh continued. “It’s like Shireen said, it’s stuff your parents tell you to do. Stuff they brag to Grandma about when she comes to visit at Thanksgiving.”

“They don’t brag to Grandma that you can juggle four eggs?”

No one laughed.

William raised his hand. “My parents didn’t tell me to take Tae Kwon Do,” he said. “They wanted me to play football.”

“Bullshit,” Holt blurted. “You’re the one who broke a cinderblock?”

Several students gasped, their eyes darting to Mr. Sykes in the back of the room, who ceased tapping and looked up, his face unreadable. Realizing his blunder, Holt stiffened, his own face paling.

Mr. Sykes said nothing, however, his gaze shifting to Ms. Palmano as she crossed the room to add Holt’s name to a small list in the corner of the dry erase board, under a placard reading Minor purchases.

“Bid, Mr. Avery?” she asked calmly.

Holt swallowed visibly. “Silent lunch?” he replied, a mixture of hope and apprehension coloring his tone.

“Just one? Don’t know if I can go that low. Maybe if we call your mom?”

“Um. Three lunches instead? Please.”

Ms. Palmano nodded, writing a small 3 next to Holt’s name. “Was it worth it, Mr. Avery?” she asked, her voice still mild.

“No, ma’am,” Holt answered, his knuckles white as he gripped the edge of his desk. At the back of the room, Mr. Sykes began tapping again, and the room relaxed fractionally.

During the whole exchange, Conor had continued to stare unrelentingly in Ashleigh’s direction, watching as the other boy followed along, willing him to turn, to look up, anything. There were echoes in his head of Guyler, of Timothy, of his mother—all of their spoken and unspoken condemnations of the other boy’s character resurfacing as his own thoughts sprouted thorns.

Liar.

Traitor.

Asshole.

Thief.

“You were saying, Mr. Thompson?” Ms. Palmano continued.

William finished smirking and returned his attention to the front. “Nobody told me to take martial arts. I did it because I wanted to. So it’s not about doing what you’re told.”

“What if I told you it is, though?”

William frowned, and Ashleigh let loose a short bark of laughter.

(Conor caught the joke a half-second later, but it wasn’t funny enough to make a dent in his anger.)

“Take a closer look at the lists, with that hint,” Ms. Palmano said.

Ashleigh did, along with everyone else. Conor didn’t. And then—

As the conversation continued, other students raising their hands, Ashleigh leaned back in his chair, turned his head, and locked eyes with Conor—just for a moment.

Nothing. Not even a crack in his easygoing façade. A grin, a nod, a casual disconnect. As if nothing was weird, as if nothing was wrong. Already his attention was back on the board.

You could try the rock thing again.

It was the worst possible time for his shoulder Ashleigh to return, and something inside Conor snapped. Reaching down under his desk, he fumbled around until his fingers found the little leatherbound journal, still with him out of inertia and habit. Pulling it out, he opened it to the first empty page, a pen materializing in his hand. Without any intercession from his conscious mind, words began to spill out.

Other students were still talking—Holt, Jennifer, a few more he didn’t know, Ms. Palmano’s crisp interruptions channeling the flow. Conor ignored them, head down as he scribbled, blood roaring in his ears. It wasn’t until two full pages later, when his pen began to run dry, that his fury cooled enough for some part of the discussion to force its way through, catching his attention again. Looking up, he saw that their teacher had drawn an arrow between two of the entries on the board, annotating each one:

“—Ben, on the other hand, just ran fast,” she was saying. “Sure, the conventions of miles and minutes are what let us measure how awesome he is, but Ben’s achievement stands on its own, without need for context.”

“Hey, my achievement stands on its own,” Holt protested, his arms crossed. “Scoring from a goal kick is hard. Most people couldn’t do it even if the field was empty!”

Conor felt as though he were waking up from a dream, a nightmare—was drained, unbalanced, as if the act of writing had burned something out of him. He looked across the room at Ashleigh, who still wasn’t looking back—

“Right,” Ms. Palmano continued, “but notice that you didn’t say you kicked a ball eighty-five yards, into a five-yard target. You said you scored a goal as keeper. See the difference?”

They were too far in, the thread too difficult to catch, and Conor was about to give up and turn back to the journal when Ashleigh spoke up again.

“So this is about, like, internal or external? Whether you’re doing it for yourself or for somebody else?”

“Probably better to say intrinsic and extrinsic, but no—not quite. It’s not about why you do it. William earned his black belt because he wanted to, but he just as easily might’ve done it to make his parents proud. The difference I’m trying to point at is in the game itself—William and Holt were playing one. Ben wasn’t—or at least, not as much.”

There was something horribly familiar in Ms. Palmano’s tone, something about the way her eyes lingered on Ashleigh’s for a fraction of a second longer than they had to, and the thing inside of Conor that had growled at Rami suddenly roared to life, a once-bitten part of him surging forward with a sense of white-hot purpose.

Ms. Palmano was his, too.

His eyes darted about, scrambling for some kind of connection, something useful he could say. They landed on the journal—

Rules.

He was late to the conversation, was shooting in the dark, but he had to say something—

His hand shot into the air. “What if you’re making up the rules of the game yourself?”

Ms. Palmano nodded approvingly. “That’s exactly the point,” she said, and Conor felt a wild, euphoric rush. “Why does Holt brag about the fact that he scored from a goal kick? Because we told him that it’s impressive, and worthy of respect. We invented a game called soccer, and built fields for it in our parks, and once or twice a week half the parents in the country drive their kids out to those fields, and meanwhile on television even the American soccer champs are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, easy. Holt’s achievement comes pre-measured and pre-cut—we know exactly how we’re supposed to feel about it. Holt knows exactly how he’s supposed to feel about it. Compare that to—let’s see—whoever it was that built their own PC. No trophies for that, not even in seventh grade.”

Jennifer broke in. “What if whoever built the computer—”

“Like we don’t all know it was Jordan—”

“—what if they did it because their parents wanted them to? Or whoever? Like, they’re on a computer science team, or something.”

“Context,” Ms. Palmano said. “Remember, I got to read your whole résumé. Sure, there are lots of things that could fall into the grey area, but when you look at the whole picture at once, it’s usually pretty clear. Somebody writes down spelling bee champion, they probably also wrote down AB honor roll, cub scout, student body rep, team captain. Somebody writes down highest flying paper airplane, I give you ten-to-one odds they also wrote about arm wrestling, breath holding, cake baking, and teaching themselves guitar—although please, don’t demonstrate, Kaitlyn, because there’s a pretty low ceiling on how good any seventh grader can be at guitar.”

There was some scattered laughter. Ashleigh caught Conor’s eye again, and for half a heartbeat it felt right and normal and familiar, a private moment shared between them in the middle of a crowded classroom. Half a heartbeat, and then resentment dropped between them like a guillotine, and Conor looked away.

“Point is, there isn’t a lot of overlap. Most of you fell pretty clearly into one bucket or the other. Which leads us to Big Picture, Part One, because this distinction is bigger than just hobbies. We’re talking about two very different ways of viewing the world.”

Ms. Palmano was now pacing back and forth across the front of the room, her hands clasped behind her back. “Let’s imagine two hypothetical people for a moment, okay? We’ll start with Sid. Sid takes his education very seriously—he’s the kind of guy who already knows which colleges he’ll be applying to. He’s the one who gets irritated when you throw the substitute off track and she doesn’t make it through the material, because excuse me, have you even considered the fact that this stuff is going to be on the quiz next week either way?”

Everyone but Conor was looking at William.

“If there’s a group project, Sid is the guy you want to work with, even though it’ll probably end up with him yelling at you for not doing your part right. When Sid’s mom asks how his day went, he’s got seven different stories—one for each period, because that’s what counts—and then he’ll go wash his plate without being asked. Raise your hand if you know Sid.”

The hands went up.

“Now, let’s talk about Anna. Anna couldn’t care less about school. It’s not that she’s dumb, or lazy—it’s just that it all seems kind of pointless and arbitrary. She goes through the motions, but she’s not fussed about the difference between an A or a C, and she’s not going to get upset if the teacher forgets to take up the homework—it’s not like she spent more than ten minutes on it anyway. She’s got more important stuff to worry about—like the doodle she’s got going on under her desk, or the trip she’s planning to go on this weekend, or her friend who’s going to the dance with some jerk loser. Most of Anna’s stories take place in the hallway, or the cafeteria, or the bathroom, because that’s where real life happens. The classes are just limbo. I assume you’ve all met Anna, too?”

They nodded.

“Okay, good. Now, let’s take Sid and Anna and put them on fast forward for about ten or fifteen years. We’re past college—let’s say we’re even past grad school, because let’s face it, Sid’s not going to be satisfied with a bachelor’s degree. Where are they now?”

Conor felt his brain surge into overdrive, once again scrambling for an answer—he had no idea where she was going with this, but he wasn’t about to let Ashleigh get there first—

Hey, uh, just checking: do you even hear yourself right now?

Ms. Palmano continued. “The party line says: Sid’s doing great, and Anna not so much. Right? That’s what your parents and teachers have always told you—you need to buckle down, focus on your studies, do the right thing now because it’ll pay off later. It’s not hard to imagine Sid as a brain surgeon or a CEO, and it’s pretty easy to imagine Anna cutting hair or waiting tables for eight bucks an hour. Maybe, if she’s lucky, she hit it big in music or Hollywood, but let’s be real, yeah?”

She paused again, gesturing at the words on the board behind her. “For better or worse, society is built for people like Sid. It’s built for them, and it’s built by them, and it works the way that Sid likes things to work. It’s systematic. It has to be—you can’t get millions of people all living shoulder to shoulder unless they’re willing to fall in line, follow some rules, work smoothly together. So people who tend to be good at that—who are good at doing what they’re told, who find the game meaningful and fulfilling—they tend to do well, inside the machine.”

Conor felt his body tensing, as if bracing for a blow. The anger, the urgency—they were still there, but they were flickering, wavering, as the words Ms. Palmano was saying fought to claim his full attention. There was a but coming, he could feel it—

“But here’s the thing,” Ms. Palmano continued. “Anna’s not stupid. At least, not necessarily. There’s certainly a perspective that says it’s dumb to refuse to play the game, if playing makes you rich and not-playing makes you poor. But there’s another, equally valid perspective that says it’s dumb to play the game if doing it makes you miserable, and not-doing-it gives you at least a chance at happiness. Anna’s not wrong to value things the system can’t really give you. It’s maybe okay for Sid, because he likes that stuff, and all the work he’s putting in now is going to come back around someday, with interest. But Anna’s already bad at the game, and the prizes don’t tempt her, either.”

Conor was fully distracted, now—or perhaps it was more accurate to say that he had let go of the distraction, was no longer thinking about Ashleigh, had become entirely absorbed in the lecture, because Ms. Palmano was suddenly talking about him—

Wait a sec—which side of the room do you think you’re sitting on?

“So what does Anna do?” Ms. Palmano continued. “She chooses anarchy. Not chaos-in-the-streets anarchy, necessarily—although not necessarily not that, either. But she doesn’t look to the system for meaning and purpose. She builds her own life, bottom up, based on the things she finds fulfilling. Friendships. Hobbies. Adventures. Stuff that makes memories.”

The teacher nodded toward the hallway, still visible through the door that Mr. Sykes had left ajar when he entered. “The thing is,” she said, “there isn’t really some real life waiting to kick in, five or ten years down the road. Things don’t just suddenly change when you turn eighteen. The adult world is somewhat more flexible than middle school, but a lot of it is just…more systems. Laws instead of rules, work instead of school.”

She raised a finger. “I want to be clear—I’m trying not to take sides, here. I think it makes sense to be Sid, in that following the rules and doing what you’re told really does actually tend to pay off, in the end. College grads tend to have much easier lives than high school dropouts.

“But there’s a certain kind of person that can’t bear to wait that long, and that person makes sense, too. If every single school day feels like seven hours of suffocation, then maybe it makes sense to give up on the dream of a six-figure salary and just go ahead and start living life for real, right now.”

Conor’s heart was beating faster than usual—as fast as if he were standing on the edge of the Gap.

“It’s funny,” Ms. Palmano said, giving a soft, sad little chuckle. “Sid and Anna both look at each other and say gosh, grow up. Sid’s like, don’t you get it, this is how the world works—and he’s not wrong. And Anna is like, man, you spend your entire life jumping through other people’s hoops, fitting yourself into other people’s boxes, being a box for other people. And she’s not wrong, either.”

Their teacher turned to face them, straightening, hands clasped behind her back as if she stood at an invisible podium. “Look around, kiddos,” she said. “The people next to you, the people across from you. Sid and Anna. Like it or not, change it or not, this is who you are today. Or at least, this is who you were yesterday, when you wrote out your résumés.”

“Come on, you can’t just cut people up based on stereotypes like that!” a girl protested.

“Says someone sitting on Anna’s side,” William pointed out.

Conor felt dizzy, disoriented. In spite of everything, he found himself looking over toward Ashleigh, catching a small frown on the other boy’s face and feeling its mirror on his own.

What did he write?

Ms. Palmano had barely glanced at Ashleigh’s résumé before assigning him to the far side of the room. Ashleigh, the science wizard, a literal choir boy who’d earned more merit badges in his single year of scouting than half the fifteen-year-olds in their troop, and who to this day still absolutely refused to jaywalk.

Ashleigh, who gave you a joint on a rooftop two weeks ago. Who put Guyler in the hospital. Who put cuss words in his fifth grade graduation speech and kept going until they literally dragged him off stage.

In fourth grade, the other boy had cut power to their entire school because he’d found a big red switch behind the cafeteria and wanted to know what it did.

And what about you, Bat-boy?

Conor looked down at his own résumé, the empty sentences he’d scribbled in haste after throwing away his first draft.

…why?

Why had he written those things down? Why had he ditched the other?

Which side of the room did he belong on, really?

Conor raised his hand, and Ms. Palmano nodded to him.

“What if we lied?” he asked.

For a brief, beautiful moment, his teacher was speechless, her mouth hanging open around an unspoken word. Then her breath escaped in a laugh, and she shook her head ruefully.

“Touché, Mr. Moreton,” she said. “That honestly did not occur to me as a possibility, and it should have. Care to switch sides?”

Conor shook his head, something squirming in his stomach. He hadn’t meant it that way, just—

“I was just wondering,” he said, feigning indifference. “It’s just—some of the stuff up there looks like it might not be true.”

There was a soft rustle as heads turned toward Ashleigh.

(Not Conor’s, though.)

Ms. Palmano glanced over her shoulder at the pair of lists and shrugged. “Generally speaking, Anna’s a better liar than Sid,” she said. “She’s got more practice, after all.”

There was a pensive silence, and Ms. Palmano picked up a marker and popped the cap, drawing a line under the words THEMISTOCLES OF ATHENS.

“I hope you haven’t all died of boredom while I’ve been droning on and on,” she said, “because now we’ve arrived at Big Picture, Part Two, and this one’s a doozy. When it comes to understanding the world and your own place in it, there’s not much that’s more important than what I have to say over the next five minutes.”

She closed her eyes, as if gathering her thoughts, and Conor chanced another glance at Ashleigh. The still-smoldering part of him almost hoped that the other boy’s face would be bored or dismissive—that he would double down on the attitude he’d shown just before the start of class, and make an ass of himself.

But Ashleigh was merely watching, quietly attentive.

Seriously, when did this become some kind of competition?

Ms. Palmano opened her eyes, began to speak.

“Who’s the most important person you can think of, in the last hundred years?” she asked. “Overall impact—don’t worry about whether they’re good or bad.”

“Einstein.”

“Hitler?”

“Martin Luther King.”

“Junior.”

“For Christ’s sake, William.”

“Bill Gates.”

“Gandhi?”

“Isn’t he from more than a hundred years ago?”

“No.”

“Harry Potter.”

Laughter. Ms. Palmano cracked a smile.

“Okay,” she said. “Now, can anybody tell me who was Einstein before Einstein? When Einstein was growing up, who was the guy everybody pointed to as the world’s most influential thinker?”

Silence.

“How about Hitler? Who was the Hitler of the 1800s?”

Jennifer raised her hand. “Napoleon?”

“Not the worst guess. How about the 1700s?”

Nobody ventured a response.

“Let’s try another tack. Who invented the computer?”

Nothing.

“Vaccines?”

Nothing.

“Plastic.”

Nothing. She was darting around, following no pattern that Conor could see.

(Other than the fact that she was clearly striking at their ignorance, looking for answers she knew they didn’t have.)

“How about something more recent? Who ended the war in Iraq?”

“Which one?” Holt muttered aloud, triggering a wave of dark laughter.

“Barack Obama,” supplied Meredith. The laughter softened into a slight rustle of surprise—no one had expected her to speak up for at least another week.

“And who ran that war? Who was the general in charge?”

Again, nothing. Conor looked around at his classmates. The ones in his row were shifting guiltily, while—true to form—the ones across the room were mostly disengaged, many of them slouching in their seats. Ashleigh was one of only a handful who still looked bought-in.

“These are all shadow versions of the same question,” Ms. Palmano said. She pointed at the board. “Who was Themistocles of Athens?”

“Somebody important,” Holt offered helpfully. A few of the Annas chuckled, while half of the Sids scowled.

“You don’t know,” Ms. Palmano said levelly. “Which is at the core of what I want you all to understand. Here it is: nothing you accomplish in life will matter.”

More than anything else, the silence that greeted this pronouncement was a testament to the changes she had wrought in them over the past two weeks. There were no cries of indignation, no shrugs of apathy—just a weighing thoughtfulness, a bit stronger on one side of the room but stretching undeniably across both. Conor noticed that Mr. Sykes was no longer tapping at his tablet, and wondered how long ago he had stopped.

“Who was Themistocles?” their teacher continued. “He was a politician and general in Athens, around the time of the Persian invasions of Greece. Before the wars, he spent most of his political capital convincing the Athenians to expand their military power, and during those wars, he used that power at Artemisium and Salamis to turn back forces that outnumbered them three to one. In short, for people whose cultural heritage traces back to the ancient Greeks—like us, if you squint—Themistocles saved the world. Without him, maybe the Persians win, democracy gets dismissed as a failed experiment, Rome has nothing to copy and never rises to prominence, and the whole arc of history looks different. And none of you know his name.”

“No fair,” Jennifer said immediately. Her voice was calm and matter-of-fact, but she spoke confidently, without hesitation. “We’re in seventh grade. We’re not supposed to know stuff like that yet—we’re here to learn it.”

Ms. Palmano shook her head. “A good argument, except for one thing—I didn’t know who he was, either. I spent half an hour on the internet last night, looking for a good example to use in class today. And it took half an hour, too. It’s simply not common knowledge. Neither is the name of the first guy to actually circumnavigate the globe, the way Columbus hoped to. Or the guy who invented the X-ray. Or the first man to go up in space. Most people don’t even know about the thing Norman Borlaug did, let alone knowing that he was the one who did it, but he probably saved over a billion lives—that’s billion with a ‘b,’ and I’m not exaggerating.”

She gave a small shrug. “Ask an average adult the questions I just asked you, and they’ll be lucky if they know the answers to a quarter of them. At best, we recognize these people because we see their names pop up on quiz shows, or because we remember them from biography book reports in grade school. At worst, we never hear about them at all.”

“That doesn’t mean they don’t matter, though,” William objected. “Just because you don’t get recognized, it doesn’t mean you weren’t important. The guy that invented the X-ray made a huge difference.”

“Also true, until you take into account the size of the known universe. Which is a bit like shooting a mosquito with a cannon, I know, but even if we stick to just the Earth, mass extinctions and dark ages and Nikola Tesla are proof that even the worthiest contributions don’t necessarily stick. But there’s a simpler, more direct way to prove my point.”

She looked up and down the ranks of desks, at Sid on one side and Anna on the other. “Any of you harbor dreams of being a doctor?” she asked. “Don’t worry, I promise not to crush them. At least, not on purpose.”

Two students cautiously raised their hands. Meredith, and a boy whose name Conor couldn’t remember. Ms. Palmano called on the boy.

“Mr. Brewer. I’d like you to picture a medical situation in which you’re saving someone’s life. Let’s say you work in a hospital—a big, fully staffed one.” She waited for a few seconds, then asked, “Got one ready for us?”

The boy nodded.

“Okay, what’s wrong?”

“School shooting.”

There was a collective flinch.

“You’re the surgeon?”

The boy nodded again.

“Okay. What would’ve happened if you were sick that day, and hadn’t come in to work?”

The boy frowned for a moment, then shrugged. “Somebody else at the hospital would’ve done the surgery.”

“And if you’d never worked there at all? If you never became a doctor? Would the victim have just died, for lack of medical care?”

“…probably not?”

Ms. Palmano spoke to the class as a whole. “You see where I’m going with this? Part of the reason Sid’s systems work so well is that they aren’t dependent on any one person. If Mr. Brewer decides not to be a doctor, somebody else will take his place. If the president gets shot, the vice president is there as a backup. Sure, if nobody decides to go to med school, we’ll run into trouble, but that doesn’t really happen. Instead, what we’ve got is a situation where doctors are needed, but if one doesn’t show up, there’s almost always another one.”

“Not in places like Africa,” said Susanne.

“True. Which is why a lot of doctors go there—to make a difference. Because here, they don’t—not really. But barely a third of our population ever makes it out of the country at all, vacations included, so you’ll forgive me if I assume most of you aren’t heading to Africa.”

Ashleigh raised his hand. “Even if it wouldn’t matter if we weren’t there, that’s not the same thing as saying it doesn’t count when we are.”

“Also true. But it means you’re reduced to being a single drop in the ocean, a single cog in the machine, and that’s kind of my point. Sid is part of society, not an independent entity. His personal contributions are effectively rendered insignificant by the fact that everyone else is pitching in, too.”

“But that’s a good thing,” Jennifer cut in.

“Oh, for sure. Life is better now than it’s ever been, after all. And you’re probably going to make it better still. Look at it this way—how many of you have been told by your parents that you can be anything you want to be?”

The hands went up.

“Logically speaking, is there any difference between that and saying ‘we don’t care and it doesn’t matter’?”

A harsh silence followed.

“So what’s the point, then?” This from William, who was looking even more upset than the rest of his fellow Sids. “Why are you telling us this? Is it just to ruin our day?”

“The opposite, actually. None of this stuff is meant to be brilliant or original—everybody gets nihilism at some point. I’m just trying to help you get it out of the way early, so you can start making decisions rationally—or at the very least, deliberately. Would you rather I lied? Pretended that every little assignment is super duper important, actually?”

There was another silence, this one more confused.

“What kinds of decisions are you talking about?” asked Rami.

“Any of them. All of them. Doesn’t matter what it is you’re trying to accomplish—having your eyes open helps.”

“But if none of it matters, why should we do anything?” asked Holt.

“Because you WANT to!” Ms. Palmano roared, causing all of them to jump. “That’s what I’ve been trying to pound into you since day one. Do what you want, because we can’t really stop you. Do what you want, because we don’t really need you. Do what you want, because ten thousand years from now, literally no one is going to remember—but the difference between eighty years of happiness and eighty years of misery will mean a whole heck of a lot to you. Take control of your life, and spend it on something, because you can’t take it with you when you die.”

A knot had formed in Conor’s stomach, had grown larger and tighter as his teacher went on until it now seemed like there was a bowling ball just behind his belly button. Almost against his will, he felt his hand rise into the air, felt the full weight of Ms. Palmano’s attention like a spotlight.

Is this your second question for the day, ‘Mister Moreton’?

“Conor?”

He swallowed. “What happens if you can’t think of anything?”

Ms. Palmano shrugged. “Then you fail seventh grade English, I guess,” she said. “Heaven forbid.”

•••

Thirty minutes later.

“You lied.”

“Did not. I didn’t say I’d done it, I said I can do it.”

“But you can’t.”

“Can, too.”

Conor’s fists were clenched, had been clenched, and now they started to tremble.

“I was there, Ashleigh,” he growled, his cheeks feeling hot enough to blister. “I was there when you chickened out, and I was there when you took it out on Guyler Stevens or whatever it was that made you pound his fucking face in. And you sure as hell haven’t gone back and done it since. You lied, and you put it on the board where everybody could see it. Where fucking Mr. Sykes could see it.”

Two feet away, Ashleigh kneed the door to his locker shut and turned to face him, arms crossed, defiant, their fellow students flowing around them. “Yeah, because I didn’t realize you’d be such a pussy about it,” he shot back. “Who gives a shit?”

“Me,” Conor hissed. “I give a shit. I worked all fucking summer for that goddamn jump. You can’t just—just give it away like that. It’s—”

“It’s what?” Ashleigh broke in, his own voice rising. “It’s yours? In case you forgot, I’m the one who found it. You never would’ve even known about it if it wasn’t for me.”

“And you never would’ve gotten up there if it wasn’t for me.”

“So what the fuck are we fighting about, then? It’s not like the stupid thing is going anywhere.”

“They could take away the pipe.”

The words had spilled from his mouth before he’d had the chance to think, and Ashleigh’s look of withering contempt was eloquent.

“Or put up a fence,” he continued, ignoring the twisting in his stomach. “Or a camera. Whatever. The point is, it was our thing. A secret.”

“You never said you wanted it to be a secret.”

“The whole plan was a secret!”

“The plan, not the jump. What were you gonna do, just jump it and then never mention it to anybody?”

Yes.

“The point is, we were supposed to decide together.”

“Fuck that noise. You’re not my mom.”

“Am I your friend?”

Ashleigh’s eyes narrowed, but Conor stood his ground. “Am I?” he repeated. “Because last I checked, friends don’t leave each other in the fucking dark for two weeks straight.”

“I was on lockdown, in case you didn’t notice.”

“Don’t fucking even. I swear to god, if you try to—to—to fucking gaslight me, here—”

Conor’s words caught in his throat, and he squeezed his eyes shut, every muscle in his body quivering.

Next time I see Eddie I’m going to fucking—

(A quick flash of memory—blood spattered across the sidewalk, the feel of his shirt tearing between his teeth.)

He took a deep, steadying breath, and continued, eyes still closed. “Answers. You owe me—you know you owe me answers. You owed them to me two goddamn weeks ago. I wasn’t going to push it, but then you pull this fucking shit and I—I’m done. I’m done. You’ve got, like, ten seconds.”

He opened his eyes to see the other boy standing perfectly still, expression tight, his own gaze dark and hooded. Around them, the hallway was emptying, only a few stragglers still rummaging through their lockers. Conor could feel time passing as if each second were another band of metal wrapping around his chest.

Five.

Four.

Three—

“I was pissed, okay?” Ashleigh snapped. “All those times you dragged me up there, and then—and I thought I had it—but then we started running and I—and you—you fucking—”

He broke off.

“I just choked, and then there you fucking go, like it’s nothing, you come up laughing and I’m stuck there holding my dick, and—”

He broke off a second time. “I was high, and I went back to try again but I couldn’t, my whole body was shaking, so I climbed back down and when I got to the bottom fucking Guyler Stevens—”

He broke off a third time, his jaw twitching. “And no, I didn’t want to talk to you about it, because it was your fault, you were the problem, you and your rules and your stupid fucking training schedule—”

Conor’s jaw fell open in pure shock.

“—and—and—and whatever, it’s fine, who gives a shit, but I just needed some time to—to cool off, okay? It was—I was—”

He faltered again, and Conor frowned, confusion seeping in around the edges of his anger, softening it.

He was what?

(The lone head still lingering in their vicinity turned their way, and Ashleigh burned it with a glare before turning back to Conor.)

“Look,” he said, and his tone was suddenly different, lower and cooler and almost bored. “I just—I wanted to sort it out on my own, all right? I didn’t want you to—I wanted you not to help.”

“You were fine talking to fucking Eddie,” Conor said pointedly.

Ashleigh shrugged. “Like I give a shit what Eddie thinks,” he said. “It wasn’t Eddie who—”

The bell rang, and they both flinched, but neither moved to leave. The silence stretched—five seconds, and then ten. Conor opened his mouth—

“Eddie didn’t fucking beat me, okay?” Ashleigh said, before he could speak. “You were better than me, and it pissed me off, and—I didn’t want it to piss me off, it’s dumb, but it did, and the last thing I wanted to see was—”

He broke off yet again. Conor was awash with emotion, anger and confusion and something that might have been pride all fighting for supremacy as he stared into his best friend’s eyes.

“Your face,” Ashleigh said finally, his voice cooling still further, becoming glasslike and smooth. “I didn’t want you floating around while my head was messed up, and I was this far from saying some stupid, friendship-ending bullshit. Maybe it was a dick move to shut you out, but I’m here, aren’t I? We’re both here. So…ball’s in your court, I guess, because if you’re looking for an apology, you’re not going to get one.”

He crossed his arms, his expression untense, unworried, un-anything as he waited for Conor’s response.

Conor didn’t have one. Out of all of the explanations he’d imagined the other boy offering, he’d never come anywhere close to this.

Jealousy?

Shame?

Insecurity?

From Ashleigh?

(He was suddenly reminded of that day—the day—when he’d turned down the other boy’s offer of a joint and gone to leave, had almost left, had been just about to start down the pipe and had been pulled back at the very last second by the look on Ashleigh’s face, cracked open and terrifyingly vulnerable. Now the mask had slipped a second time, and some deep and wordless part of Conor realized that this was what Ashleigh was really asking of him—that he play along, cover it up, keep the secret of the other boy’s mortality from everyone else. For only the second time in four long years of friendship, Conor was getting a glimpse of—of—of something, something Ashleigh kept hidden from every other person on Earth.)

(And he wanted Conor to pretend he hadn’t seen it, either.)

A decade passed.

“How did you and Guyler end up fighting?” Conor asked finally.

(That much, at least, he had to know, before weighing up all the rest.)

Ashleigh shrugged again. “He dissed my mom and called you a faggot,” he said quietly. “I gave him exactly what he was asking for.”

Conor felt his brow furrow. “You went too far,” he said.

“Fuck him.”

More silence, but only a year, this time, as the world began to turn again. They were well over a minute late, now—needed to make some kind of call, to skip or get to class, to get on with their day and with the rest of their lives. But there was still so much they hadn’t said, hadn’t touched on—

“Walk home this afternoon?” Conor asked.

(Did Ashleigh hesitate, just a little bit?)

“Sure.”

•••

Señora Dey let Conor off with a warning, but for the rest of the day, those missed minutes continued to plague him, as if it were impossible to catch up. He had to stay late to finish a quiz in Science, got caught in a line in the bathroom after Social Studies, and ended up dead last in the line in the cafeteria after knocking all of his things onto the floor just before the bell at the end of math.

By the time he’d gotten his food, he was in no mood to talk, so he walked past Eddie, Nolan, and Nicholas and joined Holt over at the silent lunch tables. The high school boy—Owen? Oliver?—was there too, head down as usual, turning the pages of his book with one hand while he ate with the other.

There was just enough time for Conor to finish his burger and fries, and then it was off to Activity. For once, he was actually looking forward to it—not only would it be his first P.E. class with Ashleigh since fifth grade, but they were slated to start soccer that week, and he and Ashleigh had history with soccer.

(It felt like that—like history with a capital H. Like magic, or destiny—as though the fact that they were playing soccer today was some sort of divine intervention, a chance at a ritual that might return the two of them to normalcy.)

They had first met on the soccer field, in the fall season of third grade—Conor as a left fullback for the Vikings, Ashleigh as a right forward on the Hawks. They’d locked shins half a dozen times in every game they’d played, culminating in a double trip that ended with each of them slinging grass and mud at the other while the ball spun uselessly into the parking lot, forgotten.

That was the same year that Ashleigh’s father got sick, and Ashleigh’s mother sold their house and moved them into Conor’s neighborhood, switching Ashleigh onto Conor’s team in the process. It wasn’t long before the two of them were carpooling together, which led to playdates, which led to sleepovers, which led to—

Guyler Stevens in the hospital.

Conor sighed, pushing aside the heavy wooden door and entering the locker room, his nose tightening at the smell of sweat and bleach.

That, too.

But before that…prank calls and night missions, porn magazines slipped to them by Ashleigh’s cousin, the dry ice bombs and the homemade napalm and the no-shit real-life actual goddamn bear.

But it had all started with soccer. With Ashleigh refusing to stop, and Conor refusing to yield, and the slow blossoming of mutual (grudging) respect when neither of them managed to break the other.

…yeah. Soccer will be good.

No sooner had he thought it, though, than thunder rumbled overhead, and sure enough, when he emerged into the gym, there were dodgeballs laid out on the center line of the polished wooden floor.

Jinxed it, whispered his shoulder Ashleigh.

Well, hitting you in the face with a dodgeball might work just as well.

But Ashleigh wasn’t there when the tardy bell rang. Conor craned his neck, scanning the clumps and clusters of students—maybe the other boy was avoiding him?

No—the coaches arranged them into rows and called the roll, and Ashleigh definitely wasn’t there. For a brief moment, Conor considered slipping out to go look for him, but if he was skipping, he could be almost anywhere. And if he wasn’t skipping—

Maybe Mr. Sykes had some questions about what he wrote on the board.

They had just begun their usual warm-up—jumping jacks, crunches, hamstring stretches—when a sharp, echoing crash from the roof brought the whole class to a standstill, drawing everyone’s eyes upward. It was followed almost immediately by a long peal of thunder, and a few kids shrugged and began moving again, but the rest continued to stare, their collective attention caught on a thin trickle of dust descending from the ceiling.

There was a wild, confused moment in which Conor both knew and refused to know, as the coaches blew their whistles and gathered the students together on the far side of the gym, opposite the place where the strange sound had come from…

It isn’t.

Of course it is.

That’s insane.

And?

After a brief, huddled conversation, one of the coaches headed for the supply closet, thumbing through a set of keys attached to his belt. Stepping inside, he began dragging aside various pieces of equipment, clearing a path to the steel ladder bolted to the back wall. The other coach directed the class into the bleachers and then disappeared into his office; between the rumbles of thunder, they could hear the muffled sound of him speaking into the phone on his desk.

No, no, no…

The dust had stopped falling, and the other students around Conor were abuzz with speculation.

“—think an air conditioner exploded, or something?”

“—gas pipe—”

“—a frigging airplane part—”

“—just thunder, you guys—”

“—that ladder goes all the way to the roof? Like a trapdoor?”

Conor’s eyes were glued to the closet, where the first coach had disappeared upward. With each passing second, he felt himself slipping deeper into a kind of nightmare paralysis, as though he could see exactly what was about to happen and was unable to do anything to stop it. It had taken him nearly ten minutes to find a way down—

It’s fine. They’re not going to find anything. If it was him, he was gone before they even blew the whistle.

But soon the seconds stretched out into minutes, and when the first coach reappeared down the ladder, it was only to call for his partner, the pair of them holding another muttered conference before he vanished upward once more.

(Conor stopped breathing.)

The second coach ducked back into the office to make another call—much shorter this time—and then hurried up the ladder himself, pausing only to threaten the students with dismemberment if they dared to move from their seats.

(Predictably, a few kids darted down from the bleachers and began to goof around on the floor, only to scurry back when the double doors swung open—)

It was Mr. Sykes.

Mr. Sykes, and the school nurse, her overlarge first aid kit slung over one shoulder.

Conor’s heart leapt into his throat. There was another interminable wait, this one punctuated by the occasional thrill of terror whenever the AP’s gaze happened to pass over him. Finally, the clunk of shoes on steel came echoing out of the closet, and Conor watched with bated breath as the first coach descended into view, swinging softly down to the ground and then lifting up his arms to spot another, smaller figure.

Ashleigh.

The other boy was moving gingerly, picking his way down the ladder with two hands and just one leg, his right bent up behind him, the ankle wrapped tightly with what looked like the blue and gold of his uniform sweatshirt. As soon as he reached the ground, the nurse rushed forward, producing an icepack and a roll of medical tape from the interior of her kit.

The second coach descended a moment later, and for a long minute, Ashleigh was hidden from view, the three adults clustering around him. When they pulled back, it was to reveal the other boy standing defiant and proud, a pair of crutches tucked under his arms, a pale bandage holding the icepack tightly to his leg. They escorted him out onto the floor, and he tapped his way straight to Mr. Sykes, sparing only a single, triumphant glance into the bleachers where Conor sat.

And then he was gone.

The double doors swung shut behind him, and the gym erupted into chaos, the image of Ashleigh allowing himself to be led quietly away crystallizing instantly into legend. Those who hadn’t already heard the story of his entry on the board were being told in awed whispers as the kids spilled out of the bleachers like conquerors, the seeds of a hundred rumors scattering in their wake.

Conor took no part, feeling numb and detached, an island of quiet in the chaos. There had been an entire conversation in that one, brief look, a flood of information that would have been incomprehensible to anyone else in the world besides Conor.

I did it! See? Told you so. It wasn’t even that hard, really. Ankle’s fucked, but who cares. And the air time! That totally counts as flying, has to, I was in the air for like two whole seconds. Worth it. And right in front of everybody! Oh, man, they’re going to be talking about this one for years…

He tuned out the voice, falling further inward, searching for a name to fit the feeling that had settled over him like a fog. A ball hit him—were they playing dodgeball, now?—and he climbed out of the bleachers, crawling around into the dark and quiet space beneath them.

Hollow.

That was how he felt. Hollow. Empty. Uninvolved—a bystander, in every possible sense of the word.

It wasn’t until halfway through Art that he unraveled the rest of the tangle, put words to the storm that was building inside him. The bag, the Gap, the bullies on the bus—even that morning, in Ms. Palmano’s class, as she shared with Ashleigh the same look that had previously been reserved for Conor—only Conor.

It was as if everything he did was a shadow of something that Ashleigh had already done, or was eventually going to do, or could easily do better if he just bothered to try. He felt like a sidekick, a second-rater, a supporting character—even when he had thoroughly outdone the other boy, had beaten him by two weeks and a sprained ankle, nobody noticed, nobody knew. Only Ashleigh, and Ashleigh wanted to win.

Nothing you accomplish in life will matter.

That was what Ms. Palmano had said, and she’d seemed to think it was a good thing, ultimately. That it might free them from trying to do what they thought they were supposed to do, give them the courage to chase whatever it was they actually wanted.

Which is what, exactly? What are you after, Bat-boy?

Conor didn’t know. But he knew that something was missing.

That night, when he couldn’t find the little leatherbound journal, he went digging through his desk, and then his drawers, and finally his closet, turning everything upside down—and everywhere he looked, he found mementos of their friendship, and always with himself just half a step behind. The trophy from their fifth grade soccer championship, where Conor had blocked the crucial shot, and Ashleigh had scored the winning goal. The photo from the skit they had starred in, in fourth grade—Ashleigh as Sherlock, Conor as Watson. The game the other boy had given him for Christmas last year, with the final boss that only Ashleigh had been able to kill.

I don’t want to beat him. I just don’t want him to always beat me.

Equals, that was all. He wanted to be—to feel like—to be treated like an equal. Not someone you could just ignore for two straight weeks, and then refuse to apologize to.

(There were tears, then, but he ignored them.)

He pulled another box off the shelf in his closet, and two small, soft objects came tumbling down—the masks they’d made for Halloween, Siphon and the Tracer. He studied them for a long moment—the curve of the lines, the arrangement of colors.

His was better.

Not that it matters when they’re just sitting up there on a shelf in the dark.

Conor felt his lip curl, something hot and savage sliding into his blood.

Okay, Ash. You want to show off for the shoobies?

Fine. I’ll play.