“Shut up,” said Sin. “Not you, Hal, Xena. She was about to start that stupid ‘wildest childish’ tongue twister again.”

“Do you know how it feels to me?” asked Wheeler. “Weirdly quiet. It’s not like I heard actual voices or words or anything. But it’s like something that used to keep me agitated all the time has taken a vacation.”

“Will that make Wheeler less weird?” asked Laurette.

“Doubtful,” said Pat.

“This is what makes me so frustrated,” said Danny. “We do this banter all the time, everybody does it, insulting each other, mocking each other, only … it hurts, doesn’t it? We hurt each other. Can’t we just stop? Can’t we just be kind? Wheeler’s not weird, he’s just another human trying to figure out how he can belong to a tribe. And in this group he doesn’t exactly stand out for weirdness, does he? Look at us. The ‘popular’ kids call us weird, because we don’t obey them and dress like them and worship them, but screw them, they’re nasty and stupid. We’re smart and … let’s stop treating each other the way they treat us. Because we don’t deserve it.”

They were all silent for a while.

“I didn’t know it bothered you,” said Laurette.

“It didn’t. I didn’t even notice it till now. But here’s Wheeler telling us that he used to be agitated all the time, and Pat and I are telling you that he was plagued with these things from outside himself, trying to make him unhappy and self-destructive, and then you have to call him weird?”

“I’m the one who said it,” said Laurette, “and I was asking if it would make him less weird—”

“I know what you said, Laurette, and it wasn’t just you. Everybody laughed. Including me!”

“But not Pat. She never laughs,” said Xena.

“Yes, she does,” said Danny. “All the time.”

“With you,” said Sim.

“At you,” said Hal. “No, erase that, sorry. It’s just such a habit!”

“It’s how we know we’re part of the group,” said Laurette. “The popular kids, they make fun of people outside their group. We tease each other, but we’re never mean to people outside.”

“Yes, we are,” said Sin.

“We’re as vicious as the popular kids,” said Xena.

“Yes, but we’re smarter, so the things we say about them are actually funny.”

“I didn’t mean to disrupt everything,” said Danny. “I’m not mad, and I’m not blaming you or anybody because I do it too. It just felt wrong, right at that moment, for us to mock Wheeler. It’s like, we found out he had a hidden wound, a dagger sticking out of his ribs, and I pulled out the dagger and then we started laughing at him for bleeding.”

“That was a really bad analogy,” said Laurette.