Toward the end of class, Marquis lugs his tuba up to the front and inflicts a solo on us. He proceeds to sit down without any explanation of his personal philosophy. Someone starts slow clapping, and the rest of the class follows suit.

“Very unique, Marquis,” Evelyn says, then checks the clock. “We have two people left. Brendan or Cham, who wants to go first?”

“I’ll go,” Brendan says.

“What he said,” I agree.

Brendan walks up my row, no tutu on today, the one day we don’t have a uniform. When he passes me, he flicks my shoulder. I bite back a smile, relieved the year is ending, because I don’t know how to fit Brendan into this world when he seems to be part of another. (My personal history will show you I’m not very good at mergers.)

Brendan faces us at the front of the room, with a triceratops staring mournfully from his T-shirt and lamenting, All my friends are dead.

“Camus is one of my many dead friends,” he starts, and there’s a little bit of laughter. “He’s very dead. Way dead. But even if he weren’t, he’d be far away. I would never have known him… and he probably wouldn’t have wanted to meet me.” He gives me a wry smile. “But that doesn’t matter. We’re still friends because he wrote something I needed to read, and I read something he needed to write.”

I stare at Brendan shamelessly because everyone else is. He’s presenting, okay? I get a free pass to take in the curl that’s fallen out of his bun, and the way his dinosaur T-shirt fits snugly around his arms.

“Maybe it’s cheesy,” Brendan says, “but writing things down condenses what it means to be a person in the universe. When someone else reads that writing, a friendship is made.” He takes Caligula out of his pocket and flips through the pages. “If Camus hadn’t written and published his… unique perspective, we wouldn’t have had the pleasure of reading and discussing the meaninglessness of life ad nauseum.” He rolls his eyes slightly, and that gets a round of laughter from nearly everyone.

“Caligula wants the moon because it’s out of his world. I think we all want that. When we connect with the honest written word, we can reach what’s in one another’s worlds.” Brendan looks right at me. “And maybe, just maybe, we can find the moon.”

I hold his gaze, and then realize that I’m holding his gaze. I look down, my heart racing.

“So yeah,” he says with a shrug. “My philosophy is to read books, or at least parts of them.”

Abigail claps loudly, and the rest of the class joins her. Evelyn beams as Brendan takes his seat. “Wonderful,” she says once the applause has died down. “Really wonderful. Just what an English teacher wants to hear.” She looks at the clock and then at me. “Ten minutes left in senior year. You ready, Cham?”

I pat my crown of frizzies down on my head. “So ready.”