CANTERBURY ACADEMY SMELLED so bad, Patricia’s nostrils burned. She kept expecting the fire alarm to go off, it was such a hot smell even on a freezing day. Nobody could find the source of this odor. It was exactly like something had died.

The smell drove Patricia out of her head, just like everyone else. She imagined this was how being drunk would feel. She kept seeing Mr. Rose observing her through the open door of his office, whenever she was between classes. In the girls’ room, Dorothy Glass and Macy Firestone each grabbed one of Patricia’s arms and shoved her up against the mirror, smeared with unidentifiable effluvia. “Tell us what you did,” they hissed at her. Patricia held her breath until they let go.

At lunch, she couldn’t stand it in the library. She kept thinking about the look Mr. Rose had been giving her, when he thought she wasn’t looking. She was sure: He was responsible for Laurence’s disappearance and this debilitating cloud of foulness. The two things were no coincidence. She was surer than caution.

She stalked down the hallway, lockers vibrating with her strides, and she hardly cared that she was getting a faceful of the death stench, with the exertion.

Just as she reached his doorway, a phrase popped into her head: “The trap that can be ignored is no trap.” She caught her breath—maybe CH@NG3M3 was wiser than it knew—but then she breathed in once again, and the maddening decay got in her nostrils again. She was going to confront this monster, once and for all.

“Miss Delfine.” Mr. Rose looked up from his computer and beckoned her to come sit in the nearest carpety chair facing him. The odor was strongest here in Mr. Rose’s office, but he seemed unbothered. “Always a pleasure to see you.” The door closed behind her.

The smell, it was beyond describing. You might as well have punched Patricia in the nose over and over.

“Uh, hi.” Patricia tried to sit still, but she couldn’t help fidgeting. She was at the epicenter of foulness. “I hope I’m not bothering you at a bad time.”

“I’m always here for you, just as I am for all the students here. What’s on your mind?”

“I’m wondering, umm, about Laurence. I haven’t seen him since Tuesday, and it’s Friday, and it seems weird that nobody’s even mentioned him. I was, umm, wondering if you knew what happened to him.”

Mr. Rose spread out his left palm on the desk. “I know as much as you do.” His right hand was doing something under the table. Patricia realized that “I know as much as you do” could be a loaded sentence, since there was a lot that they both knew. Or he was hinting he knew everything she did. Trap trap trap.