Flags were waving in front of the tidy blond-brick school, where nineteen hundred boisterous upper-middle-class students were jostling and shuffling into classrooms. Weed’s mood lifted. At least his father lived in the right school district. Weed kept clothes and other belongings in his father’s house, pretending he lived there, too. If Weed couldn’t go to Godwin, there would be no art or music in his life.

The 8:35 tardy bell was ringing as Weed slammed shut the door to his bright orange locker and ran through empty corridors of different colored walls, the classrooms he passed filled with chatter and laughter and the thud and flutter of books opening on desktops. Weed had a phobia of being late that preceded this moment by many years.

His mother worked all the time and was rarely home or awake to get Weed up for school. Sometimes he overslept, sending him flying down to the corner bus stop in a panic, without books or lunch, barely dressed. In his mind, missing the bus meant missing life and being left alone in an empty house that echoed with past fights between parents who had split and the loud, full-of-himself sounds of Weed’s big brother, Twister, who was dead.

Weed galloped around a corner to the science department just as Mr. Pretty began hall duty from the table outside Mrs. Fan’s biology class, where this second Weed was supposed to be getting ready to take a quiz.

“Whoa,” Mr. Pretty called out as Weed ran past and the tardy bell stopped and doors up and down the halls shut.

“I’m going to Mrs. Fan’s class,” Weed gasped.

“Do you know where it is?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Pretty. Right there.” Weed pointed at the red door less than twenty steps away, and wondered what kind of stupid question was that.

“You’re late,” Mr. Pretty told him.

“The bell just quit,” Weed said. “You can almost still hear it.”

“Late is late, Weed.”

“I didn’t mean to be.”

“And I don’t guess you have a pass,” said Mr. Pretty, who taught ninth-grade Western Civilization.

“I don’t got a pass,” Weed said as indignation gathered, “’cause I wasn’t planning on being late. But my ride just got here and there wasn’t nothing I could do about it and I ran all the way so I wouldn’t be late. And now you’re making me later, Mr. Pretty.”

Mr. Pretty’s compulsion was to pull kids but not ticket them. He was young and nice-looking and had an insatiable need for captive audiences. He was notorious for holding kids in the hall as long as possible while they fidgeted and stared at the rooms where they were supposed to be as classes and quizzes went on without them.

“Don’t blame me or your ride for being tardy,” said Mr. Pretty from behind his small table in the empty intersection of shiny, empty hallways.

“I’m not blaming. I’m just saying the way it is.”

“If I were you, I’d watch my mouth, Weed.”