Elaine Morrissey sat behind her desk, looking grim. Mr. Burklander stood behind her, madder than Charlie had ever seen him. He looked betrayed.
“Sit down.” Mrs. Morrissey’s voice was barely restrained. It almost trembled.
Charlie and Peter took the two uncomfortable seats in front of her desk and glanced warily at each other.
“I have a student in the hospital.”
“Vanhi?” Charlie blurted out hopefully, feeling a ray of hope. Was she still alive?
“What? Why would Vanhi be in the hospital?” Morrissey asked, baffled. Vanhi’s mom had indeed called the school several times already and spoken to the Game, who assured her that all steps were being taken.
“Alex?” Charlie tried again.
“No. What are you going on about? Zeke.”
“Zeke?”
“Zeke Taylor. Overdosed on some kind of drug they’re not even sure what it was, it was so tainted. He’s in a coma. He probably won’t ever come out.”
She paused, her eyes boring into them, waiting for them to say something. Peter just looked down at his hands, unconcerned, pleasantly aloof, the way he always was, which made people wonder, Who is this guy? I want to know this guy.… But this time it looked more sinister to Charlie. It felt like biding.
Morrissey leaned in. “And then after I go to the hospital and watch his parents cry over his ruined life, I get this.”
She turned her monitor toward them, and Charlie watched her click on a file attached to an anonymous email that said, “Watch This!” He felt his stomach churn as he saw the video of them on the Embankment from just last week, Charlie and Peter lounging in the grass, talking. It was shot from above, from a security camera Charlie hadn’t even known existed. Peter handing Charlie the crumpled brown lunch bag. Charlie walking it stupidly, innocently, across the grass (He gave me half his lunch yesterday. I forgot mine). Zeke looking up lazily, his long dirty-blond dreads and washed-out eyes (Hey, from Peter) (Thanks, dude).
“I’m alerting the police,” Morrissey told them. “You killed that boy.”
“No.” Charlie shook his head. Peter put a hand on Charlie’s wrist, as if about to remind Charlie of his Miranda rights. But he couldn’t stop talking. “I thought it was a sandwich.” He realized the moment it left his mouth how lame it sounded. His voice was desperate. “I didn’t … I wouldn’t…”
“Is that right?” the Dragon Lady said coldly. She pulled her phone closer, across her desk. Charlie couldn’t process what was happening. The police were coming? For him? Just like that? Before he knew what he was saying, it came out:
“It was Peter’s! He said it was food.”
If Peter cared, he didn’t show it. He didn’t flinch or protest. He just stared down at his manicured nails benignly.
“Then how do you explain this?” Mr. Burklander asked.
Morrissey clicked on the second attachment, and another video came up. It was Charlie at Neiman’s, buying the bracelet with his wad of cash.
“I guess we know where you got that kind of money,” Mr. B. said.
“No.”
Peter put another gentle hand on Charlie’s forearm, but he swept it off.
“Those two things have nothing to do with each other!” And that was true! They were both crimes, apparently, just separate crimes. “I … I … made that money at my job.”
Burklander snorted. “At the copy shop?”
“Yes,” Charlie said, so desperately he felt pathetic.
He felt the wires tightening around him, curling like a vine around his chair, over his wrists and through his legs, across his neck.
Morrissey said bitterly, “We always knew Peter had a bolt loose. But you? You, Charlie?”
Burklander lost it then. “Goddamnit, Charlie. You ruined everything. You made an ass of me. Everything I did. All year. Trying to pull you back from the edge over and over. And you were doing this? You let me put you in front of Harvard? I knew you were lost, Charlie. I didn’t know you were gone.”
Charlie tried to answer. To tell him something that would wipe the heartbroken look off his face. Charlie came up with nothing.
Morrissey picked up the phone. She was dialing, then waiting as it rang. A rising panic came over Charlie. Was this the end? Would they frog-march him out the main door, in front of the entire school? Would he really go to jail?
His panic reached a fever pitch. The attacks had been scary. But he could fight his way out of those. This was the system, as invisible as it was ubiquitous. There was no one to punch back against. Two undoctored videos and the apparatus was in motion. His whole life over while he was still alive to suffer through it. Arrested, like Scott Parker. That couldn’t be his path.
The picture on Elaine Morrissey’s desk moved.
It was a photograph of her family. Three beautiful children around her. A grinning husband, his arms around her. The Dragon Lady was actually smiling in it.
Then the husband and children in the photo turned their heads and gasped.
It startled Charlie.
They were looking across the desk at another Elaine Morrissey—not the one on the phone, waiting for the district liaison officer to answer—but one on her back on the desk, her skirt hiked up. Mr. Burklander was over her—not the real Mr. Burklander standing against the wall now, fuming, his eyes closed, but another Mr. B., plucked from another moment in time in this very room, just a week prior—his pants unceremoniously around his ankles, his white Costco boxers halfway down, hands on the desk on either side of his boss, in the very place where they were supposed to be adults guarding the well-being of children.
“Fuck me, Edward,” said Elaine Morrissey’s doppelgänger.
In the picture on her desk, the husband dropped his head in shame. The three children’s mouths opened into identical cartoon O’s.
“Fuck me, Edward,” Charlie said out loud, before he even realized he was doing it.
“Excuse me?” Morrissey roared, her hand over the receiver of her phone.
“Fuck me, Edward,” Charlie said, deliberately this time, across the Rubicon, driven by the sheer terror of prison.
Morrissey froze, her hand over the receiver. Ed Burklander opened his eyes and stared at Charlie.
“Right there.” Charlie pointed at the spot on the desk where the phantom Ed and Elaine were now fading away, translucent ghosts still pumping in forbidden passion. “Right there, in front of the picture of your children?”
Now Charlie realized he was not just scared but angry. Because his mom was gone, but this mom was alive and treating her own family like garbage, just as his dad and Susan McAllister had done to him, screwing each other in secret while the real Mrs. Lake was suffering through chemo. All the rage and fear was now one indistinguishable emotion that he could only perceive as forward.
“Right there. And there. And how many other places?” The scenes were now flashing in front of his eyes, visible only to him. “Your house? At three in the afternoon.” He looked at Morrissey. “Your bed?” He looked at Burklander. “Your classroom?”
They were all talking at once. Elaine Morrissey was saying, “How could you…”
But Burklander was fully enraged now, standing tall, coming toward them. “If you think, for one second, that you can blackmail us…”
“Ed,” Morrissey said, “wait…”
“They are not going to…”
“Ed”—tears filled Morrissey’s eyes—“you don’t have a family.…”
Burklander stood right in Charlie’s face.
“Ed, you don’t have kids.…”
“I don’t care,” he said, eyes burning. “They will not get away with this.”
“Yes, we will.” It was the first time Peter had spoken, and he said it with his head still tucked down against his neck, calm and collected.
He stood up and stared at Mr. Burklander. The look in Peter’s eyes was cold. Morrissey was right. There really was a bolt loose. His eyes were shining, but it wasn’t from those mirror neurons that made people feel for others. The sparkle in Peter’s eyes reflected inward, an illusion, mirror on mirror: infinite regress that was infinitely thin. Charlie wondered, Had it always been that way? Why was he seeing it now?
“You will sit down,” Peter said to Burklander, raising a hand and pointing at him. “You will listen to your lady friend and keep quiet, about me, about Charlie, all of this.” No fear was in Peter’s voice.
“Or what?” Mr. B. didn’t look like a teacher now. He looked like a grown man who’d had enough. Enough of kids. Enough of disrespect. He was one step short of rolling up his sleeves and pummeling Peter.
Charlie felt things spinning out of control. His anger had faded. He regretted immediately what he’d said to Mr. B. It was like his talk with Vanhi—what was real? How he felt now or two seconds ago? He tried to keep Peter from stepping toward Mr. B., but Peter shoved him back.
“Or what?” Mr. B. said again, a growl this time, stepping toward Peter. “You ruined Charlie. I can’t fix that now. But you are done.”
Peter moved his hand in the air. The arcane gesture was like a magus conjuring spirits, then he thrust his hand palm-forward and shot an invisible signal at the speed of light and Ed Burklander convulsed. His chest thrust back and his eyes went wide and bulged out. His implanted defibrillator went off like a mule kick. It sent him buckling to the ground.
His back arched up and he passed out.
Elaine Morrissey cried out and ran to his side, propping up his head in her arms. “Get help,” she cried. “Somebody get help. Oh, Eddie.”
“Come on.” Peter walked toward the door, leaving Elaine Morrissey on the floor cradling Burklander’s head and reaching back blindly for the phone above her on her desk.
Charlie tried to run toward Mr. B., but Peter grabbed him around the chest and yanked him back, with more power than Charlie realized Peter had.
“What did you do?” Charlie yelled at him. “Is he okay?”
“He’s fine.” Peter dragged Charlie out of the room. “He just got a little pacemaker jolt. Happens all the time. Come on.”
Charlie struggled to get away, but Peter was too strong.
Morrissey was dialing 911.
Peter caught her eyes. “You won’t say another word about us, will you?”
She shook her head, terrified.
“Go,” Peter said to Charlie, shoving him into the hallway.
Outside the office, Charlie spun on him. “What did you do?”
Peter wiggled his fingers in the air and said merrily, “I used the Force!”