Kane did run to the nurse after all. It seemed like the only safe place to go. The Others knew where he lived and had searched his room. The Others knew his class schedule, where he was supposed to be and when. Kane thought of leaving school and going someplace in town—maybe Roost, or St. Agnes—but every idea seemed too predictable. Too like him. The Others knew all about him, and therefore anything familiar was off limits.

The nurse’s office was not familiar. The nurse led Kane into a back room with a small cot wrapped in paper, where he sat and watched the doorknob. Eventually he felt brave enough to take out his journal, and for the next several hours he wrote down everything that came into his head. Every theory. Every whim. It didn’t matter how strange or unreal. He just needed it on paper and out of his head.

A knock came at the door, waking him up sometime later. He didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep. Politely, the nurse let him know the school day had ended and asked if he needed to use a phone to call his dad.

“I’m good. I want to walk home,” he said as he collected his things.

The school was eerily empty in the rich golden light of the afternoon. There was the sound of lockers slamming and laughter, but they were distant sounds that seemed to emanate from another world. Kane blinked away his sleepiness. Unsure of where to go, he pulled into the library and slumped into his favorite spot by the back shelves. There he scanned the lists he’d made in his journal before passing out. The first was labeled The Others:

• Ursula Abernathy—bad liar, sporty. hates birds.

• Adeline Bishop—a little mean but always right

• Elliot Levi—straight yet magical thief

• Dean Flores—hot recluse?

The second list was labeled Questions:

• Am I Other? Do I unravel?

• What did The Others do to Maxine Osman?

• What is a reverie? vision? Are these magic??

• What is real??

• Glowing isopods (not lobsters)

Then, at the bottom of the page, Kane had scrawled one word over and over.

DeadWeight.

Kane shoved the journal in his bag and made for the high school’s front exit, but something stopped him going home and giving up. He was uncertain about so much—about this world, about these people, about what it meant to be deadweight—but he did know one thing: he was alive.

Since his grandmother’s funeral, he realized that when people tell stories about the dead, they create life in reverse. What’s remembered about a person becomes what was real about them after they’re gone. But Kane wasn’t dead yet, and his story was still his to tell. Whatever he’d been through, whatever mysterious calamity he had survived, it was up to him to figure out what happened next.