Out the windows, September light bends over the football field. At fifteen he’s old enough to understand that it’s not only his state of fatherlessness or his thrift store jeans or that he has to swallow sixty milligrams of buspirone every morning to keep the roar at bay: his differences run deeper. Other tenth-grade boys hunt elk or shoplift Red Bulls from Jacksons or smoke weed at the ski hill or cooperate in online battle squads. Seymour studies the quantities of methane locked in melting Siberian permafrost. Reading about declining owl populations led him to deforestation which led to soil erosion which led to ocean pollution which led to coral bleaching, everything warming, melting, and dying faster than scientists predicted, every system on the planet connected by countless invisible threads to every other: cricket players in Delhi vomiting from Chinese air pollution, Indonesian peat fires pushing billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere over California, million-acre bushfires in Australia turning what’s left of New Zealand’s glaciers pink. A warmer planet = more water vapor in the atmosphere = even warmer planet = more water vapor = warmer planet still = thawing permafrost = more carbon and methane trapped in that permafrost releasing into the atmosphere = more heat = less permafrost = less polar ice to reflect the sun’s energy, and all this evidence, all these studies are sitting there in the library for anybody to find, but as far as Seymour can tell, he’s the only one looking.

Some nights, Eden’s Gate glowing beyond his bedroom curtain, he can almost hear dozens of colossal feedback loops churning all over the planet, rasping and grinding like great invisible millwheels in the sky.

Mrs. Tweedy taps the eraser of her pencil against her desk. “Hello? Earth to Seymour?”

He draws a tsunami rearing over a city. Stick-people run from doorways, throw themselves from windows. He prints ENVIRO-AWARENESS CLUB, TUESDAY, BREAK, ROOM 114 across the top and TOO LATE TO WAKE UP, ASSHOLES? across the bottom and Mrs. Tweedy tells him to erase ASSHOLES before she’ll make copies on the faculty copier.