One

HOODIES COME OUT of the rain, four of them, coasting down the Birchwood Terraces slope on stunt bikes. Green hood leads, followed by blue, yellow, and white, their knees up around their ears, steering with one hand, letting the other dangle.

My jacket’s zipped to my chin, but if I could, I’d pull my whole head inside, tortoise-style, and wait out this ritual. Got to wear the old stone face, though. Prove I’m hard.

They hang a left, straying across both lanes toward the school-bus-stop shelter where I stand. Some of the other kids shift, tensing here beneath the corrugated plastic roof, where the sound of raindrops is amplified to a snare drum backbeat.

Green Hood circles the shelter, gone, back, gone, back, the other hoodies trailing behind. Scoping the new-kid situation. I focus on the sign across the street, peeling and faded, welcoming people to the Birchwood Terraces development—Affordable Family Housing—ready to eat my ration of shit so they can forget about me.

“Who’s that?” Green Hood says.

“Dunno.” Blue Hood reappears.

“Hey. Who are you?” Green Hood flashes by. “Hello-o-o? You speak-ay Engleesh?” Something bounces off my chest, and my gaze follows it to the mud. A balled-up gum wrapper. Back to the sign. Affordablefamilyhousing. Affordablefamilyhousing. I’m going to make it here. I am.

“What’s up with her hair?” Blue.

“Looks like Christmas barfed on her head.” Green.

Laughter, from the hoodies and the other kids. Take it. Take it. My jaw clenches so tightly that the tendons jump in my neck.

A girl speaks in a low monotone: “Aidan?”

Green Hood puts his foot down to brake when he sees who’s talking.

She stands to my right, tallish, rangy, wearing a charcoal-colored fleece, her blond hair in a brief ponytail. A middle-of-the-classroom type, average, nothing to see here. Only her gaze—shrewd, eyes a barely-there shade of gray—makes her something more. She twitches her head once. “No.”

She could be telling a cat not to play with her shoelaces. I expect f-bombs, but Green Hood just sniffs, wipes his nose on his hand, and shoves off down the street, letting the rest of them play catch-up.

She turns to me. “Goddamn hoodies make everybody look bad.” Her expression’s deadpan, a real stone face, not like the mask I wear. “We aren’t all assholes, I swear.”

I don’t thank her—I can tell she wouldn’t like that—and I don’t ruin everything by saying that she should’ve let the ritual play out, that now they’ll only wait until they can get me alone. I search for chitchat. “They left fast. You must be scary.”

A slight nod, no softening in her expression. “So, I’m Bree.” She points to the girl beside her. “That’s Sage.”

Sage. A gymnast’s build, tortoiseshell glasses, her hair a lob ombré’d from deep brown to platinum. She wears trendy hot-girl clothes—skinny jeans, a lace-trim cami—and a flannel boyfriend shirt over it all. Boyfriend because it’s huge on her, maybe XL, in shades of brown and green, washed and worn to a soft patina.

When Sage grins, it’s forthright, devilish. “How’re you liking the Terraces so far?”

“It’s”—I scan the identical cube houses lining the cul-de-sac, shabby little three-family units, each with a shared parking area and a strip of backyard facing the woods—“very beige.”

They laugh, a relief, but Bree’s gaze is still sharp. “Why’d you come here?”

Typical accusatory question. One thing I’ve learned, moving from one dying town to the next: everybody in a place like this thinks they’re being held hostage. “My dad’s working the mill demolition.” Their dads are probably on unemployment, now that Pender isn’t making paper anymore.

“Oh. The wicked-built guy with all the tats?” Bree bumps shoulders with Sage, says to me, “We were watching out the window when you moved in.”

“No shit. You get to call him daddy?” Sage cackles. “Luck-y. He could tuck me into bed anytime.” She sees me flinch, glances at Bree. “Too far?”

Bree measures a half inch between thumb and forefinger as the school bus stops at the curb, all shrieking brakes and groaning hydraulics. We clomp on board into a funk of stale air, old vinyl, and spectral puke from bus rides past. I swing into the first empty seat. The girls choose the seat across the aisle. Bree raises her voice over the din: “What’s your name?”

“Clara.”

She considers. “How about Clarabelle?” She glances at Sage, who shrugs approval.

I can’t tell if they’re joking. I look at the floor, Sage’s block-heel mules and Bree’s canvas sneakers together, my leopard-print skimmers keeping their distance.

Pender District High is a cinder-block bunker with low, grimy windows that open on cranks, and rows of battered purple lockers. A mural of the sweater-wearing, steam-snorting mascot consumes the wall by the office, gift of the class of ’18. Go-o-o, Raging Elks.

Bree and Sage are sucked away into the major artery of the place, and then there’s just me, Clara Morrison, Human Conversation Piece, the girl who’s starting school on a Friday, over a month late, with her hair a dye-kit disaster, a mess of reddish-green streaks in hair faded yellow with lightener. I pretend I can’t feel the eyes on me as I circulate through the usual manic pre-homeroom buzz, searching for room six so I can be marked present. In body, never in spirit.

First-day highlight reel:

Mr. Spille, second-period American history, is PDHS’s resident drunk teacher. Never straying far from his desk, he delivers his lecture to us on gusts of minty breath spray with base notes of bourbon. We learn about Harpers Ferry for fifteen minutes until an earnest-faced boy diverts him into a period-long conversation about the Patriots’ draft picks. I doodle in my notebook until the bell rings. It’s restful.

Hot lunch is slices of anemic turkey, a scoop of instant potatoes with gravy, and green beans drowning in their own bodily fluids. Thank God I brown-bag it. I peel back the tinfoil on my sandwich, the crust an inch from my mouth when I notice the white specks. Bread’s gone bad.

Someone put a sticker on my back. Elmo, holding a gold star, smiling gapingly, with the words Good Job! underneath. I have no idea how long it’s been there.

My study hall is in Mrs. Klatts’s room, which has a western exposure, facing an overgrown field bleeding into woods. I’m about to open A Clockwork Orange—the rest of my junior English class has already read through page one hundred—when instinct flicks my ear, making me look up at the exact second Bree and Sage sprint across the field, legs pumping, heading for the cover of a single stand of yew trees.

I glance at Klatts, buried in her planner, the bowed heads of the other kids. I’m the only one seeing this, at least in room twelve.

Bree and Sage crouch out of sight, then pelt toward the woods. A moment later, they’re gone. I wait for teachers to give chase, for sirens and searchlights. Nothing. The clock over the whiteboard ticks on.

I spend the rest of study hall with my chin resting on my folded arms, staring after them.

Shocker: Bree and Sage don’t get on the bus at the end of the day.

I slouch in my seat. Decompression. Or maybe decomposition? Gazing out the rain-speckled window, I register a transition from light to shadow as we drive beneath an overpass. That’s when I notice the writing.

Four feet tall, somehow spray-painted across the underside of the pass; the tagger must’ve hung upside down from the girders like a bat. The message makes me turn even though it’s too late, we’re through, back in the gray light.

The words said Fear Him.