“The alias,” says Isolde. “Claus. Shuffle those letters.”

Shuffle the letters? What’s she talking about?

“Lucas,” comes a voice from the floor. Fender is still staring straight ahead. “If you rearrange Claus, you get Lucas.”

Checkout

Fender

Claus and Lucas are the same person.

Claus was an anagram for the biggest secret she was carrying around. There was no way she could use Lucas’s real name, so he became Claus.

She made Lucas into a character, as she often did with strangers.

She’s so very good at it.

She could become a writer.

I look at the boy with the blond braid in front of me.

This can’t be her.

She’s dead.

“Lucas is your best friend. You would never have believed me.” She rests a hand on my arm, but I pull it away.

This is too much.

I can’t do this.

When I turn around, I see that Lucas has disappeared. Where’s he gone?

I jump to my feet and head into the hallway. Someone calls my name, but I ignore it. I’ll talk to Lucas first. I need to hear this from him.

I look left and then right. At the end of the hallway, I see someone darting around the corner.

I run down the hallway. Ahead, a door with a red-and-white sign on it is clattering. The emergency exit. Lucas is escaping onto the roof.

The stairs up there are steep. With every step, Claus’s words echo through my mind.

It’s me.

Claus is Lucas.

C L A U S = L U C A S

At the top of the stairs, I fling the door open, and the wind blasts into my face. For a moment, I’m overcome by the darkness outside, but then I see dozens of lights from the buildings around me.

“Lucas!” He is standing right by the edge, looking down. “What are you doing?”

Lucas looks around. “Stay there, Fender.”

“Please step away from the edge.”

“I said stay there!”

“Okay, okay. Calm down.”

Lucas looks down again. His feet are just a couple of inches from the edge. My shirt flaps around my body.

“Lucas, listen to me,” I say quietly. I think about how Linnea found me this afternoon on the windowsill. She calmed me down by talking to me. As long as we’re talking, Lucas can’t jump.

“I know it’s not true. There’s no way you can be Claus.”

The wind carries my words away. Did he hear me?

“You’re my best friend, aren’t you?”

Down below, car horns are hooting. I can hear an ambulance nearby, as if they’re already on their way.

Then Lucas starts laughing. It’s high-pitched and shrill. “Is that what you think?”

He slowly turns around.

“Do you really think we’re friends?”

I shake my head. “This isn’t the time for jokes.”