Mr. Burklander was forty-seven years old when the kids in his twelfth-grade creative writing class heard the story about his wife dumping all of his clothes onto the front lawn from the second-story window of their house. He had a massive heart attack and blacked out in the grass in his boxers. It was hard, looking him in the eye when he came back, but they all did, because they all loved him.
No one ever heard why his wife tossed him out, exactly, but the way Jennifer Miller wasn’t in Mr. Burklander’s class anymore, there were some rumors. But that’s all they were. Rumors.
Mr. Burklander approached Charlie as the rest of the class cleared out. Charlie was staring down at his desk, lost in thought.
“How’s it going?”
Charlie glanced up, looking surprised. “Fine, I guess.”
“You didn’t turn in your story.”
“I had writer’s block.”
“I don’t accept that, Charlie. There’s no such thing as writer’s block. You just sit down and do it, like a job, whether it feels right or not. I want you to try. I think writing could help you find a way out of this place you’re in. I really believe that.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Charlie slung his backpack and went for the door.
Mr. Burklander’s hand caught him. He pulled Charlie around, a bit brusquely.
“I’m not messing around here. This is your life.” Mr. Burklander’s eyes softened. “I lost my mother when I was in my twenties. I remember. I had this dream, for years after. She was standing under a building that was shaking. I kept pulling on her arm, trying to get her to move, but she wouldn’t. And a piece of the building came down, right on top of her. I’m almost fifty, Charlie, and I still remember how that dream felt, when I woke up. I always woke up right when the building came down. You will get past this, Charlie. You have your whole life ahead of you.”
Charlie tried to shake his arm loose, but then he didn’t.
Only Mr. Burklander was still trying to save Charlie. Burklander was the faculty sponsor for student council. He’d always liked Charlie.
When Charlie’s mom died, his grades went from A’s to C’s. He had been on track for valedictorian. He and Vanhi had a pact to go to Harvard together. Now he just wanted to run in the opposite direction of anyone trying to remind him of who he once was. The school tried to help. He couldn’t blame them for any of this. They tried to hook him up with counselors. They offered him a semester off, then a year off. But he refused their help, in ways big and small. It was insulting. It made him feel weak. If he wanted to throw it all away, they couldn’t stop him. Screw them. Screw it all. He didn’t want to go to Harvard anyway. He just wanted to be left alone. Eventually, the teachers got tired of taking his abuse. Most of them, anyway. He didn’t know whether to love or hate the one who was still trying.
He considered Mr. Burklander for a second. Could he really have slept with a student? Was it possible? He was everyone’s favorite teacher. The kind that told off-color jokes and wrote Fuck on the chalkboard when they were discussing Catcher in the Rye. Could he really sink so low? Why would he still have a job? Did the school cover it up somehow?
But all he saw now, looking in Mr. Burklander’s eyes, was kindness. And genuine concern.
So Charlie just said, “Okay,” which was about the most cooperative thing he said these days, agreeing to nothing.
Charlie went to the portables. They were the buildings beyond the south end of the school. Like any big, sprawling public high school, it was overcrowded. People bustled in the hallways shoulder to shoulder, knocking against each other. The city passed a bond issue to expand the school southward, past the Embankment, but then the economy collapsed and the school was left with rows of portable buildings, glorified trailers, surrounded by construction materials, just waiting for the economy to pick back up and the bond funding to come through. Charlie passed piles of bricks and remembered another version of himself, on student council, petitioning the school board for more space. It felt like another life.
Charlie found Alex where he expected him, sitting on the steps of a portable, eating his lunch. He was all alone. His hair flopped down in his face, his baggy jeans and vintage Metallica shirt looking worn. He was reading Vonnegut and eating a sad-looking bologna sandwich, as if there were any other kind.
“What are you doing out here?” Alex asked.
“Looking for you.”
“Why?”
“You haven’t been around much lately.”
“Been busy.”
Charlie made a show of looking around the empty lot. “I can see that.”
“Fuck off.” Alex managed a weak smile.
Charlie wondered what he was doing out here. The truth was, he wasn’t sure how he felt about Alex anymore. When Peter arrived, Alex had become, well, less relevant in Charlie’s world. Alex and Peter both veered toward nihilism, but Peter’s brand of nihilism was sleek and exciting. Alex’s was lonely and misfity—Peter, as harsh as it seemed, was just more fun. He was easier. And something about Alex, lately, was unsettling. It was hard to put a finger on it exactly. It was just that sometimes, looking in his eyes, Charlie felt as if he were gazing into a bottomless pit. He could draw a line back to the boy who sat outside parties in middle school, drawing with chalk on the pavement about his real home back on Mars.
But then again, the Vindicators were a place for people who didn’t have a place. Wasn’t that why they started it?
“Come on,” Charlie said. “Come eat with us.”
Alex shook his head. “Nah, I’m okay.”
“Why not?”
“I just feel like reading.”
Charlie noticed something on the wall behind Alex. Some graffiti, written in pen, in Alex’s handwriting.
The sentence was incomplete: ALL MUST …
“‘All must’ what?”
“Huh?”
“That graffiti. ‘All must’ what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I was just bored.”
Charlie wanted to call bullshit, but he let it go.
“You’ll come to the Tech Lab after school? We have something important to discuss. A new project.” Project was their code word for pranks and other official tasks of the group. Back in the day, that was part of their raison d’être—pranks for truth and justice, never mean, just once-a-year social commentaries, such as rearranging the football fund-raiser, a pumpkin patch, into a giant phallus. But with Vanhi and Kenny obsessing over college applications, and Charlie neck-deep in his own grief, no one had even thought about a senior-year prank yet, until the God AI presented its challenge to Charlie and Peter.
Hearing the word project, Alex’s face lit up. For a moment, he looked like the old Alex. Charlie wondered if Alex had drifted because of them—because they’d all been too preoccupied with their own lives to notice? When had Alex first misstepped, and how far gone was he now? For a fleeting moment, the veil of Charlie’s grief lifted, and he asked himself, What happened to the sweet, goofy Alex, and what happened to me?
“Sure,” Alex said. “I’ll try to stop by.”
“Cool. Watch out for ice-nine.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, already back in his book.
Mary Clark hated her mom. No, that wasn’t fair. She didn’t hate her mother. She hated what her mother stood for. That morning, Mary had tried to leave the house exactly the way she wanted. No makeup. Sweats. She knew she would look horrible without all her fancy clothes and subtle makeup—that’s what her mother had always told her—but she didn’t care. She was trapped in a box and didn’t know how to get out. She thought of Tim and shuddered.
Her mother caught her on the way out the door. “Dear, run back upstairs.”
“I’m going to be late.”
“That’s okay. It’s worth it.” Her mom could land a comment like no one else, a few simple words, no drama, yet it always sliced through every defense and went straight to the bone.
Mary’s heart sank. She ran back upstairs and fixed herself up.
As she headed out the second time, her mother gave her an approving nod and told her the same phrase she’d heard for years: “It’s important to look pretty.”
The bracelet burned on her wrist. She wanted to throw it in the trash. Or better yet, return it to whatever fancy store Tim had bought it from and give the money to charity. She didn’t dare. She remembered the pain when Tim had dug into her wrist. But the real power he had over her was elsewhere. He didn’t have to remind her of what he knew. It was in his eyes.
I own you.
It was funny. Everyone wanted to be her. And she was the last person she wanted to be.
She felt the need to do something reckless.
Without thinking, she walked toward the east stairwell, where she knew Charlie met Peter after school.
It’s just a ride, after all, she thought.
Who could blame her for that? Who would even know?
Vanhi ran home during free period, to work on her application. She wanted to be alone to do it, in the quiet of her home. No other students around to freak her out.
Vanhi was a bundle of contradictions. She was an ace student. She loved manga and Comic-Con and Neil Gaiman. She had desperately wanted to go to Harvard since she was ten, when her mom and dad brought her back a Harvard T-shirt from a rare vacation. She played electric bass in a band called the Dipshits, until they broke up. Her hair was red with black stripes now. Before that, it was purple, and before that, silver. She was punk and nerd and misfit and badass, all at once. Sometimes she wished she could just pick one because most of the time she felt as if she were being pulled in twenty different directions.
She logged into the system and stared at her Harvard application.
It was perfect, except for the one thing no one knew about. Not even her parents, because she doctored her report card online before they saw it.
She bombed AP US History. It was crazy. She was a great student. She could code like nobody’s business. She aced every class. But she got cocky and blew off studying for the exam. In chemistry, in physics, she could just feel how the problems could be solved. In English she could compose a fluid, lovely essay without a second thought. The atoms snapped together, the balls bounced, the words popped. But she scoffed at AP History—a bunch of rote memorization of dead facts? That’s what Google was for. There was no logic, no thought. Memorization was so twentieth century. She’d read the book but she hadn’t memorized what color George Washington’s jockstrap was, for God’s sake. How was she supposed to know or care who John Muir was? It was a onetime mistake, but she couldn’t take it back. There, on her perfect record, was a bleak mark. It pulled her whole GPA down. It sank her class ranking from 1 or 2 to 57. And when Harvard rejected 95 percent of applicants, that’s all it took. Her life dream went down the toilet in one bad day.
Nobody knew. They just assumed she would get in. She hadn’t told anyone. It was her secret shame. Vanhi read her essay for the twentieth time. She felt like a fraud. All this work, and it was pointless. The grade was a deal killer.
She fixed a couple commas, then knocked the mouse away.
She picked up her bass and let her fingers stretch over the frets, feeling the tension.
She could hear her mom in her head:
Whoever heard of an Indian bass player anyway?
Um, Mohini Dey, Ma?
She let her fingers run the bass line to “Another One Bites the Dust.”
In honor of her Harvard application.
Screw it.
She put the bass away.
It was time for the Vindicators.
Charlie was waiting for Peter by the stairs when someone entirely unexpected approached.
“Hi, Charlie.”
And there was Mary Clark, a vision from his past, floating above it all, looking stunning. She was a cheerleader, a student-body rep, founded their Students Against Destructive Decisions chapter. And, a genuinely nice person, unlike the circle of monsters she surrounded herself with.
He remembered their friendship, freshman year on student council. They would talk and laugh as they worked together on anti-graffiti initiatives or dress-code reform. But there was an invisible boundary. Outside student council, they kept to different worlds.
So the idea of her walking up now, in broad daylight, without even the thread of student council connecting them anymore, was a shock.
“Hi,” Charlie said back, waiting for her to reveal her purpose.
“Are you going to the Grove tonight?”
He wasn’t. The Grove was where students went, deep in the woods, to drink and hang out, under the pagan lights of bonfires and idling cars. Charlie hadn’t ventured there ever, much less been invited there. But something made him lie now.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Could you give me a ride?”
He thought he heard wrong, but he decided to pretend he hadn’t. “Sure. I can get my dad’s car.”
He wanted to say something suave, or clever, or anything. But he was so confused he didn’t know where to start. Mary Clark was not short on rides. And more perplexing was why Tim wasn’t taking her, if any guy was. And what would Tim do to Charlie when he found out?
“Thanks” was all she said, as if this were all the most natural thing in the world.
She was walking off when Peter appeared at Charlie’s shoulder and said jovially, “What the fuck?”
“I don’t know.”
“I thought you quit student council?”
“I did.”
“Maybe she needs help with her next campaign for better toilet paper.”
Charlie ignored him.
“Come on,” Peter said. “We’re gonna be late for the Vindicators.”
While Charlie and Peter went to the basement of the school, Edward Burklander was in the office of the principal, Elaine Morrissey. A forty-eight-year-old, married mother of three, including one son at the high school, she had summoned Mr. Burklander to her office. She asked him to close the door. She had a serious look on her face. As they got close, the door closed, the electricity between them became too much to bear, and they fell into each other, again, knocking papers and a plastic bin of pencils off her desk. He slid her skirt up and ran his hand along the soft inner line of her thigh. She arched her back up and he pulled off his belt. As he slipped into her, she cried out, just a little, and tried to knock over a picture of her husband and children on her desk so that they wouldn’t be staring at her. But the photo was just out of reach, and soon she forgot about it entirely.
In the corner of the room, her computer hummed.