Eden’s mother’s texts proved she was also alive, so it wasn’t like the urgent matter was another death or at least not her mother’s.

The music room was empty.

She sat and waited.

Crumpled-up balls of paper lay under music stands and chairs, and some smashed pretzels decorated the floor tiles. An M&M had been crushed into cracked red shell-splat.

She checked her phone.

Probably he was just in the bathroom. The idea of her teacher—or anyone, really—reading her messages in the bathroom … gross.

The train seemed especially loud through the open window.

On the smart board, a homework assignment for a pop composition class Eden didn’t take was like a foreign language.

On her phone, she followed a new follower—a middle schooler she knew from the neighborhood who’d apparently just gotten a phone—but not all of them. None of them was Julian.

She checked her friends’ latest stories and posts.

Anjali had just taken a selfie by the poster for the upcoming school play—The Music Man—hanging in the building’s front windows. She looked cute with her hair in those high pigtail buns, but Eden hadn’t told her that, so she commented on it now: Cute hair.

Then a heart and a thumbs-up.

She opened her news app and read headlines but not articles: An earthquake overseas. A shooting in California.

Her Citizen app said that people were reporting the smell of smoke a mile away.

She refreshed everything.

Took a selfie, hated it, deleted it.

Listened to the saved voice mail from her dad, felt calmed.

Mr. McKay still wasn’t there. She looked around again—there was no jacket or bottle of water or coffee mug on the desk or any sign at all, really, that Mr. McKay had even been there recently, except maybe the open window.

The only thing on the desk was a small cube. It was shiny and black—about the size of a Rubik’s Cube—with smoothed corner edges. Probably some speaker or Siri-type thing she’d never seen before. Maybe a high-tech metronome?

A text from Anjali: Well?

The girl had no patience at all.

Had the cube thing just lit up for a second?

Eden was about to queue up one of her dad’s Spotify playlists—maybe “Elevator Music”—when the door to the room flew open.

Finally.

But it wasn’t Mr. M.

Marwan

MARWAN

“What are you doing here?” Marwan asked as the door closed slowly behind him.

Eden Montgomery looked up at him for a second, then back down at her phone. “I’m not really sure,” she said.

“I got a message about an ‘urgent matter,’ ” he said, making air quotes.

“Yeah, me too.” She stared toward the front of the room.

“What do you think it is?” he asked.

“No idea,” she said.

“Where’s Mr. M?”

“Not here,” she said.

“Should we wait?”

“I guess?”