A white petal ruffled in the breeze, then tore free from the wilting carnation on the student's grave and tumbled away. At first flowers appeared daily, loose handfuls, and even real bouquets. Then summer began, and visitors came to the church cemetery near the school campus less often. By the fall semester, old students had forgotten him, and new students wondered who he'd been. They had their own art to create, after all. He might have been special—but he was dead.

One student still came, however, not often, but occasionally. He sat on the grass and looked at the mounded earth, and sometimes spoke softly. One mild dawn, he dug into the sod beside the plain gravestone and buried, as far down as he could reach, a circular metallic disc wrapped in a few folded sheets of paper. Later, rain filled the loosely packed hole with mud and silt, and erased the faint hollow.

The dead student's name became a school story, part legend and part warning. The boy he had been, however, and the man he might have grown to be, were both forgotten....Except by his murderer.