He stands in the night in his windbreaker at the corner of Lake and Park. Christmas lights dot the gutters of the Eden’s Gate showroom at perfectly spaced intervals. Black cameras have been mounted under the eaves, and stickers shaped like badges gleam in the bottom corners of windows, and complicated-looking locks protect the front and rear gates.

Security systems. Alarms. Getting in there and leaving something behind without being noticed is not feasible. But the west side of the realty office and the east side of the library, he observes, are less than four feet apart. In the space between, there’s hardly room for a gas meter and a frozen stripe of snow. Smuggling an explosive into the realty office might be impossible. But the library?

• SEEMORE6: I came up with a spot
• MATHILDA: a target?
• SEEMORE6: a task, my way 2 disrupt machine 2 help wake people up begin real change
• MATHILDA: what have you
• SEEMORE6: 2 earn my way 2 the camp
• MATHILDA: come up with?
• SEEMORE6: 2 u

The PDF Mathilda sends via Pryva-C is full of typos and klutzy diagrams. But the concept is plain: fuses, pressure cookers, prepaid phones, everything duplicated in case the first bomb fails. He buys one pressure cooker at Lakeport Drug and a second at Ridley’s and two padlock hasps at Bergesen Hardware and mounts these to the inside of his bedroom door and to the door of the toolshed.

Unscrewing the grenades is easier than he imagined. The explosive filler inside looks harmless, like little blond flakes of quartz. He uses an old letter scale of Pawpaw’s: twenty ounces into each cooker.

He keeps going to school. Keeps mopping floors at the rink. All his life a prologue and now it’s finally going to begin.

In early February he is charging three prepaid Alcatel Tracfones behind the skate-rental counter when he looks up to see Janet in her denim jacket.

“Hi.”

New frog patches line her sleeves. Her hat is the kind of wool that looks so soft that you never want to take it off, the kind he has never had. She has the tanned cheekbones of a skier and looking at her he feels as if he has matured a decade since tenth grade, as if the Janet Infatuation was an era humans lived through a thousand years ago.

She says, “I haven’t seen you.”

Act normal. Everything is normal.

“I never told anyone what you did. If you’re wondering.”

He glances at the soda machine, the skates in their cubbies. Better not to say anything.

“Eighteen kids showed up last week to EAC, Seymour. I thought you might want to know. We got the cafeteria to reduce food waste, and it’s all bamboo napkins, now, bamboo is like regrowable, or what’s the word?”

“Sustainable.”

Out on the ice teenagers in sweatshirts laugh as they glide past the safety glass. Fun: all anyone cares about.