Obviously Claire had lost sight of her answer to Sarah’s question long before the words had finished leaving her mouth, but the important thing was that she had created a context for Sarah’s future inquiries (Half Blessed was a group thing, stringent like a religion but not a religion) and, disregarding the rest, had pegged it with a few terms Sarah could use to propel her investigation further, namely “sex pacts and blood rituals,” something called “blind fires.” Was Greg a part of it? Was that what made him act the way he did? After their lunch period ended at 12:52 Claire drifted off to trigonometry (which she called “trigonometrics” in the spirit of complication) pretty much having forgotten everything she’d said, while Sarah crossed the school’s hypotenuse from the south to the west unit and climbed the stairs to her AP English class, where she embarked on further literary analysis and, similarly, traced dense passages of text for their older meanings. Coincidentally, for different reasons, during that same period, Beth’s older brother Greg spread a wide swath of his own blood across the stall door in one of the first-floor men’s bathrooms. If one was dedicated to the cause, they could have found some geometry in it (or “geometricates”), that the bathroom, the very stall, was directly one floor below the seat in English where Sarah sat. But no one was making those connections at this point.

But before there was Greg—or before Greg became wrapped up in our broader aims—there was David. David was closer to Sarah than most others by virtue of the fact that they had dated for a few heady months, and at the end of it Sarah had even floated the idea of applying to the same colleges the next year. After their split—nominally David’s doing, though Sarah had prompted the conversation—they remained superficially friends, because Sarah was committed to a strict pact of non-awkwardness (she was mature that way), meaning they stayed teetering on intimacy: if David ever texted or engaged her in any way, Sarah always responded, exhaustively. David harbored a quiet and largely unspoken desire for revenge, primarily because he’d felt totally out of his depth in the relationship, because while Sarah appeared to be ready for serious relationship commitment at sixteen, David was still deciding if he should take the SAT again or not this year; he felt his concerns were shallow by comparison, and he resented it. In the months since their breakup last fall, he had been spending more and more of his time on YouTube, drifting quickly through the topsoil of self-improvement and wellness videos into the caverns of crypto-fascist pseudoscience and conspiracy theories catered to his exact demographic. By the time spring came, he was susceptible, his head filled with self-righteous garbage. David was where we started. He was an easy sell. He was also blessed in that he had a sick-ass basement.