“I told you, I don’t feel like going.” He lies down again, like he’s bored with the game. “Mabley and I are going to do something. I don’t know what we’re going to do.”

“We’re playing hooky,” Mabley says. It’s the first thing she’s said since I got there—but she likes the word. She’s the kind of kid who likes to use phrases like that. “Why don’t you come with us?”

I can’t tell if she wants me to or not. “But we’ve got to take the test.”

“My test is over,” she says. “I don’t know how I did and I don’t care. Sometimes I get too hung up on that stuff. My grandmother once told me, it’s important sometimes to break the rules. So that’s what we’re going to do.”

“What are you going to do?”

Pete is laughing, like a kid who can’t stop—he’s doing the laugh you can just do if you want to laugh. Most kids have a laugh they can force, just to show they’re laughing.

“I don’t know.” Mabley is laughing a little, too. It’s infectious. “We’ll think of something.”

“But we need you, Pete. For the team competition. You need three people to compete.”

But he can’t stop himself—he’s even losing his breath. I look at them both for a moment. It’s like we’re playing some game, but I don’t like the team I’m on. There’s nothing I can do about it, though, because that’s just how it is, that’s who I am, the kid who is going to go back inside to take the test, because his teacher is looking for him.

“You should come with us,” Mabley says. She brushes the grass off her lap and stands up. There’s a kind of park outside the school, with a few trees, but most of the leaves have fallen. It’s a sunny day, though, the sky is blue, and everything feels weird—warm and dead. “Let’s go, Peter.” She pulls him up, and he looks at me.

“You coming, too?”

For a second I think, maybe he wants me to. There’s a parking lot next to the grassy area, and after that, a quiet street with a few houses on the other side. And after that, who knows. Somewhere in the distance you can hear highway sounds, a lot of cars driving smoothly at the same speed.

“What are you going to do?”

And Mabley pulls something out of her pocket. “I’ve got ten dollars. I’m going to find something you can get for ten dollars.” She leans her head a little to the side. “You coming or not?”

“I’ve got a test.”

“Suit yourself,” she says.

And they walk off together through the grass toward the parking lot. I watch them go, then suddenly worry that the double doors have locked behind me. For some reason, panic rises up in me, like water spilling over a glass, but when I push against the doors, they open—and I go back inside the gym and close them behind me. It takes me a minute to get used to the change of light. There aren’t any windows, just long rows of electric spotlights in the ceiling.