Mr. Morton, the drama teacher, was moderating first-period study hall, drinking coffee out of a paper cup as tall as his forearm was long. He waved the cup in my direction. “Favor us, Michael,” he said, in the fake English accent he uses to read Shakespeare plays aloud, “with at least the appearance of industry.” I pulled out my earth science poster, which had gotten crushed in the taxi, and started coloring.
My project looked worse than I remembered. It was supposed to show the layers of stuff on the inside of planet earth. Except the circle I had drawn for the earth looked more like an oval on one end, and a rectangle on the other—I’d kind of realized it wasn’t much of a circle halfway through drawing it, and tried to backtrack, which turned out to be even more of a disaster.
I was coloring the mantle red, and the red marker was running out. No matter how hard I pressed, I ended up with only a thin stripe of color that disappeared almost entirely when I accidentally rubbed it with my arm. At this point all I could do was make it look like at least I’d tried to color.
But there’s something about just doing the same thing over and over that always makes me feel better. Like, on the first day that Gus didn’t save me a seat at lunch—when I walked into the cafeteria to find him at the basketball table, hunched over because I’m sure he didn’t want to see me looking for him—I went home after school and just started playing Wreckless: The Yakuza Missions. It was weird, by the time I’d gotten through three levels, I kind of didn’t care anymore about Gus. I didn’t feel better, exactly. I guess I just didn’t feel. My whole brain was filled up with remembering all the details of exactly how hard to push the buttons, exactly when to move my guy and how far.
I started to think about The Yakuza Missions as I was coloring, and about video games in general, and it started to hit me that the layers of the earth were kind of like the levels of a video game. They get weirder and you know less about what you’re getting into as you move to the center, and there are these little extra hard parts in between.
Like D-double-prime. It’s this thin ring around the iron ball in the very middle of the earth. No one really knows what is inside D-double-prime, or why the sound waves made by earthquakes can’t get through it. Crazy, right?
It’s funny how quickly I can get into a daydream, because after what felt like no time at all, the bell rang, and there I was just barely done with the iron core. D-double-prime looked nothing like the way I’d imagined it—it was just a whole bunch of green squiggly lines. My red marker was totally kaput, and I still had to finish coloring in the mantle. Not to mention the entire crust of the earth. We have four minutes between classes, and I was supposed to be drawing all the oceans and land masses of our planet. In cross section. There was just no way.
So instead of coloring the crust, I decided to leave the outline of the egg shape, and just label everything. But even then I miscalculated how much space the words would take up, and ended up kind of crunching the letters at the end of “basaltic magma,” and “Mohorovicic Discontinuity.” My poster looked like a three-year-old had done it, like something Mr. Blum was going to write “See me” on, because what he had to say was too harsh to put in writing.
At the sound of the second bell, I rushed out of study hall and ran up the stairs to the instrument room. The instrument room is on the top floor of the school, across the hall from the upper-class lounge. Every time I have orchestra, I have to push past the stream of older kids on their way to the lounge. I hunch over to keep the cello from bouncing on the steps, and the older kids plaster themselves against the wall so I don’t hit them with the big black case. It’s totally embarrassing.
Today I passed Gus’s new best friend, Trip Hall. Trip Hall doesn’t know that I’m Gus’s old best friend. I don’t think he really has any idea who I am, except the really short eighth grader with the really big cello. “Look,” he said, when he saw me now. “It’s Quasimodo.” Siobhan Clarke and Torrance Hisslin were right behind him, and they giggled. All three of them had to line up against the wall so I could pass by. Julia used to be friends with Siobhan and Torrance, but not anymore. “They’ve turned into bimbos,” I remember hearing Julia tell my mom.
Trip said, “What do you have in there, a dead body?” Siobhan and Torrance giggled again. The way I felt as they watched me hitch the cello down one step at a time reminded me of a thin kind of papery crunching noise, like I’d sat on a bag of potato chips in the middle of a quiet room.
But I felt something else as well. The cold feeling—it got worse. It had never really gone away, but now it was like a tingling—like the way your hands feel in the winter when you’ve been back inside for a while, but they’re still a little numb.
Usually when kids make comments about the cello, or about how short I am, it makes me feel small. But today I felt kind of—I don’t know—mad. Like the coldness was waking me up—making me see things. Like I wasn’t the kid being made fun of, but I was watching that kid.
I didn’t do anything about it, though. Just looked down at the ground like a big wuss. And got to orchestra after everyone else was done tuning, so my notes sounded worse than usual. At the end of orchestra, Mr. Pierce gave me a lecture on the importance of being on time, and I was even more late for earth science. At least I had something I could turn in. That would be a relief.
Except that as soon as I walked through the classroom door, I noticed that Tori Lublin was standing up at the front of the room, holding a plasticine model of a volcano. I watched in horror as Mr. Blum plugged in a cord that came from the bottom of her volcano, and a red lightbulb inside it turned on and smoke started to rise from the crater.
Please, please, please, I prayed inside my head. We’re not really religious in my family—my dad was Jewish but is now an atheist, and my mom was Christian but likes the Jewish holidays better. No one ever taught me how to pray, and I’ve just started making up my own way of doing it, primarily in moments of great need, like this one. “Please, please, please—” is generally as far as I get.
“Excuse me, Tori,” said Mr. Blum. “I see we have a late entrant. Please take a seat, Michael, so that Tori can continue her oral report.”
“Oral?” I said. My prayer had definitely not been answered.
“You do remember that today we’re presenting our oral reports?”
I swallowed hard. I found my seat. I tried not to cry. No, I did not remember.
This didn’t make any sense, but I started to be a little mad at the cold feeling, as if it was responsible for my forgetting. Why wasn’t it going away? It made everything else that was annoying so much worse. Usually, I guess I’m pretty good at ignoring things. But the cold feeling was waking me up, and making me see. I didn’t like it.
Meanwhile, Tori started to explain how most volcanoes happen under the ocean without anyone knowing about them. Is it worth mentioning that Tori’s dad is a movie producer, and one of his assistants helps her with her homework every night? It’s true.
Gus went next, standing up slowly, untangling the sleeves of his blazer—we are supposed to wear blazers all the time but can mostly get away with carrying them.
When he took off his shoes, all the girls were like, “Eww!” His shoes are falling apart, and he has wrapped the left one in duct tape. He put the shoes on Mr. Blum’s desk, on either side of a rubber place mat that I recognized from his kitchen.
For a second, he leaned over the place mat, scratching the back of his knee with his opposite foot, a habit he has. He pushed down on the shoes and moved them toward each other, and the place mat was forced up into a mountain. He made the simple motion look like a magic trick.
“My shoes are the plates that move around on the surface of the earth,” he said. “And this place mat is showing how mountains are formed.”
“Well conceived,” Mr. Blum commented. “If slightly unhygienic.”
Brilliant Ewan Greer went next, and we had to turn out the lights so he could display the computer modeling he’d done of the formation of the Appalachian mountain range. It was basically the same as Gus’s project, except it looked like something developed by NASA, instead of developed by Gus on the way out the door that morning.
Ewan didn’t come to Selden until just before winter break, but even if he had started at the beginning of the year, he wouldn’t have fit in. He doesn’t play sports because of his asthma. He’s on a scholarship. He wears shirts that look shiny, and pants that are too short. He doesn’t wash his hair. He reads during lunch. And he’s always sticking his hand up like he is dying to tell everyone the answers. Even the teachers are annoyed and don’t want to call on him.
At the end of the presentation, he showed a picture of himself on top of some of the mountains in the Appalachian range, and in the picture, he actually looked clean and healthy. He was standing next to a man in a big sweater and a red ski hat, and they were both smiling big goofy smiles.
“I took that picture with the timer on my camera,” Ewan said.
“Is that your dad?” Mr. Blum asked.
Even in the dim light, I could see that Ewan was ducking his head. “Yeah,” he mumbled, and switched off the projector. “It’s an old picture. That was a really long time ago.”
He sounded embarrassed, which is kind of weird. I know his parents are divorced, because only his mom is listed in the school directory, and that’s what they do at Selden. But I don’t know why that would be embarrassing. Half the kids in our class have parents who are divorced.
Sam Gershwin went next. All he had to show for himself was his sister’s garnet ring—the melted rock inside the earth’s mantle is made up of the same stuff that’s in garnet. When Mr. Blum asked him if it was okay to pass the ring around the classroom, Sam got really nervous. “Okay,” he said. “But don’t lose it. She doesn’t exactly know it’s here.” Sam’s lame report made me feel better, but then again, everybody knows Sam goes to Study Skills, which means he spends study hall in a small room in the basement where a lady teaches you how to make neat outlines of everything. Study Skills doesn’t help anyone, it just makes it official that you’re dumb. My mom thinks I need to go.
Every time Mr. Blum asked for a volunteer, I looked down. My only chance of survival was hoping there wasn’t enough time for all the presentations in one day. Everything would be better if I had one more day. The cold feeling was like having to pee—always there, getting a little worse with the passing of time. Maybe, after I warmed up, I could ask Julia what she did in earth science when she was in eighth grade. She probably got an A. I couldn’t help thinking about how warm her room would be right now.
“Michael?” Mr. Blum was sitting on the corner of his desk, brushing off the spot where Gus’s shoes had left some caked mud. “I think you’re the last one.”
When I looked under my desk for the poster board, I realized it had unrolled. I had been stepping on it all during class without realizing it, and now, on top of being really sucky, it was covered with black footprints.
“Um,” I said, standing in front of the whole class, with my half-finished, stepped-on, wrinkled poster stretched between two hands. I wanted to rub my hands together to warm up my fingers, but I was holding the poster. Mr. Blum rolled his palm open, indicating that I should start talking.
“This is, I guess,” I said, “the earth? These are the layers.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Not another word. I was dumb. I was the stupidest person in the world.
“Do you want to tell us a little bit about the layers?” Mr. Blum prompted. “Or at least do you want to tell us how your report takes the information you got from the book and goes a little further?”
“I didn’t know this was going to be an out-loud kind of thing,” I said.
“You don’t have to say anything extraordinary, Michael. Just tell us a little bit about what you had in mind here.”
“Um,” I started again. I pointed to the center of the egg-shaped orb that was supposed to be earth. “This is the core.” I pointed to the half-colored pinkish red section. “This is the mantle. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say about them. The mantle is hot. The iron is really, um, iron-y.”
Mr. Blum sighed. “Try to expand these ideas a little?”
Expand this, I was thinking. If I brought home another C, my dad was going to throw the Xbox away. Thinking about the Xbox made me start thinking about video games, and thinking about video games reminded me of the idea I’d had while I was coloring that morning in study hall. And even though the cold feeling was really annoying, it was also keeping me awake in a weird way. I think it was making my brain work differently. Was my brain working faster? I don’t know. But it was the cold feeling—I swear—that made me start talking.
“What this really shows,” I said, “is not just the layers of the earth. But a map for a new video game. The name of the video game is D-double-prime. D-double-prime is here.” I pointed to the green squiggles I’d made outside the circle of iron at the core. “It’s that weird layer you were talking about the other day that no one understands, even actual scientists. But the game starts here.” I pointed to the top of the crust. “You need to get all the way through the crust and the mantle. You have to go down there because there’s a war going on at the surface of the planet, and you’re fighting against the computer machines who are taking over from the humans. The only way to shut them down is to get some kind of special rock that’s inside that layer.”
“It would have to be iron,” Mr. Blum said. “The core is made of iron. Didn’t you just explain that?”
“Okay,” I said. “Some special iron. And you start off fighting the machines, until you can find the hole into the deep parts of the crust.”
“Like an abandoned mine?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And then you get into the mantle from there. You have to get on a special kind of wet suit that would allow you to swim through the melted rock.”
“That would be some wet suit,” said Mr. Blum. But he was giving me a look he usually saves for students who do the homework.
“Or you can go in a special submarine kind of thing, with blasters to fight off all the scary dinosaur slug things that you find in the mine or the mantle or whatever. Things would be catching fire, like, constantly.”
“That’s actually a really cool idea,” I heard Ewan say.
“I’d play it,” said Sam.
“The first geology-based video game,” Mr. Blum said.
“The last level would be D-double-prime,” I went on, feeling my own idea growing as I thought about it. “And down there it would be, like, totally black, except you’d see pieces of the earth that had sunk down there, like on the news when there’s a flood somewhere and you see people’s roofs and cars and trees floating down a river. Except a lot of it would be on fire. You’d see water lit up only by the flames.”
“You realize, of course, that by the time pieces of the earth’s crust reached D-double-prime, all traces of human life would have been completely obliterated?” said Mr. Blum.
“But this is a video game,” I protested. “It has to be cool.”
“Okay,” said Mr. Blum, putting a hand in the air. “I stand corrected.”
Just then the bell rang. Everyone started piling up their books and shuffling their papers together. I felt kind of excited by my idea, and I was thinking about asking Mr. Blum right then and there if he could promise I wasn’t going to get a C. But before I could even ask the question, he said, “Michael, can you see me for a second?”
Mr. Blum gestured for me to take a seat at an empty desk in the front row. “Your video game idea was great,” he said. “It showed a good understanding of the material and I think even helped the class find the magic in what we know about the interior of our planet. But when I look at your work on the page, I have to wonder why we don’t see any of your good ideas coming through.”
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to try to answer that question.
“You can do better,” Mr. Blum said. That’s what teachers are always saying to me. “But there’s nothing I can do to help you if you don’t start to pay attention. Leave yourself more time. And here, I’ll give you a chance now. If you want to bring this home and turn it into a real map of a video game, I’ll let you turn it in by Friday. How’s that?”
“Okay,” I said, feeling all the excitement of people actually liking my idea flow out of my body. I didn’t want another chance with that poster board. I was too cold to work on anything. All I wanted was to get warm. Playing video games would warm me up, not coloring in maps of them. I didn’t care that I was crushing my poster as I rolled it back up and stuck it in the top of my book bag. The second bell rang, and Mr. Blum said, “Better hurry, Michael. You’re not supposed to be late for assembly. Good luck.”
I ran, but still, I got to assembly when everyone else was sitting down, and I had to stand looking for a place to sit for far too long. It’s been weeks since I would expect Gus to be saving me a seat, but I always kind of check anyway, like one day things will go back to normal. I noticed Julia was all comfy in her seat already. She was sitting next to the exchange student from Germany, Inge. Because she’s so busy with ballet, Julia always makes friends with the exchange students. Every time they go back to wherever they’ve come from—and some of these places, I’ve never even heard of—Julia boo-hoos to my mom about how she has no friends at school, until my parents pay for the plane ticket to go visit them. It’s so unfair. They give me a hard time about each and every Xbox game, and in the meantime, Julia’s spending thousands of dollars on international flights. Last summer alone, she flew to Japan and Buenos Aires. The other day, I heard her tell Mom that London was getting boring.
I must have been looking around for a long time, because eventually Ms. Rosoff beckoned me to her. Ms. Rosoff’s the art teacher who isn’t really a teacher at all—or even an artist. She did an assembly once where she told us she was some kind of handwriting expert who used to work for the FBI. No one believed her—last time I checked, FBI agents don’t wear big purple dresses and talk so softly into the microphone that you can’t hear half of what they say. Near the end of her assembly, everyone at Selden started clapping as if she were finished, and we had to write her personal letters of apology that were signed by our parents.
Anyway, Ms. Rosoff is my advisor, and it’s her job to make sure everyone in her group shows up for assembly and checks in with her. Usually she doesn’t even do this—she’s the kind of teacher who never knows when the girls are passing notes and can’t remember which period we have lunch. But this morning, she pointed out a free seat in the front row, right next to Ewan Greer.
Ewan carries a giant duffel instead of a backpack, and he slid it over on the floor to make room. Ewan always keeps that duffel bag with him, as if he’s afraid someone will take it. Which they probably would, because he’s Ewan, the kid who breaks every curve. “Hi,” Ewan said. I lifted my hand in a half wave and he flinched, like he was afraid that I was going to hit him. “I liked your video game idea.”
“Un-huh,” I said. With kids like Ewan, it’s scary to say hi to them. You don’t want to be the only person in the world to be their friend.
But then I made the mistake of looking Ewan straight in the eye. The cold that I’d been feeling all morning suddenly got much worse. Looking at Ewan, I felt how cold he was, and I felt as cold as that. I felt like I was Ewan. Inside his small gray eyes, I was standing on a blacktop mountain road. I recognized the road, because in art, it is the only thing Ewan ever draws. I’d seen it in charcoal, and papier-mâché. I’d seen it wrapping around the outside of a coil pot, the tall pine trees etched with a paper clip, the rock cliff that drops off to one side imprinted with old toothbrush bristles.
I was so cold, I couldn’t think of the word “cold.” Instead, I was thinking that I was locked. I couldn’t move.
As I continued to stare at Ewan, I think he was starting to get a little freaked out. He attempted a smile, but all I could see were his eyes, and behind them that lonely, curving road. I saw Ewan walking alongside it. Snow fell down the collar of his jacket—I felt how it would be on his neck. The sky was gray. Just as I could feel the cold wind along the side of the road, I could feel Ewan’s wishing, wishing for something he knew he couldn’t have. And I was wishing very hard too.
I heard these words come out of my mouth: “Your dad was watching you,” I said. “That day when you stood by the road. He knew what you wanted. He wanted it too. But all he could do was watch. He’s watching you now.”
I swear I had no idea why I said that to him. I didn’t know what I was talking about.
Ewan’s smile sagged, without disappearing entirely, as if he was so surprised by what I’d said he’d forgotten about his own face entirely.
“What did you say?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said, and I found I could move my eyes again. “Forget it.”
“Forget it?” he kind of choked out. His eyes were wet, and his voice was cracking. Was he crying?
“Shh,” I said, because you don’t want to have people see you crying in assembly. You don’t want to be noticed in assembly at all.
Ewan stood up, threaded his way through the legs of everyone in our row, and walked up the aisle to the doors in the back as if he didn’t care that everyone was staring at him, and that you couldn’t just walk out of assembly without getting a detention.
I turned to see if anyone else had noticed, and my eyes bumped right into Ms. Rosoff’s watery blue ones, which always remind me of a fish’s. She must have heard the whole thing.
“What did you say to him?” she whispered. “You made him cry.”
“Me?” I whispered back. “Nothing. I don’t know. Isn’t he going to get in trouble? He’s leaving assembly.”
“You said something about his father,” Ms. Rosoff hissed. Her face was so close to mine now, I could smell toothpaste on her breath—she smokes, but no one is supposed to know—and I suddenly remembered how during her handwriting assembly there was this one cool moment when she took anonymous handwriting samples from kids and could tell all sorts of things about them based on the size of their letters, or the way they cross their t’s. Because my writing goes downhill, she told me I was shy. She said she suspected Gus had divorced parents because he didn’t close his o’s at the top. Everyone who was being rude in the audience suddenly got quiet, and for a few minutes, it was like, “Wow, maybe this isn’t the same person who gets lost on the way to the teachers’ lounge.”
“What did you say to Ewan?” Ms. Rosoff asked again, and she didn’t seem lost at all. She seemed angry. “About his father.”
“I didn’t say it,” I insisted. I thought for a second about telling her how cold I was, how the cold feeling was getting worse. “I don’t know anything about his father.”
“You don’t know,” she spat out, in that I-have-a-hard-time-believing-this voice, “that Ewan’s father died in a car crash a month before he moved here?”
“Oh,” I said. Before I even remembered what I’d said to Ewan, I thought, Oh, man. Poor Ewan. And then I made the connection: Ewan’s dad. Ewan’s gray eyes. Ewan’s road.
“Ms. Rosoff,” I said, “I think I need to go to the nurse.”