He shrugged and sat down in a chair by a drum kit, dropping his backpack and the bike helmet clipped to it to the floor.

He’d thought this had something to do with his run-in with Christos earlier today. They’d almost come to blows when Christos pulled on Numdal’s hijab. But that wouldn’t have anything to do with Mr. M, who was the kind of guy who knew, like most sane people, that Christos was possibly a sociopath who was on the wrong side of history and everything, just in general. The sort of student even teachers avoided if they could.

Marwan and Christos had basically been clashing since kindergarten, when their fathers got into a thing because Marwan’s father was recording their moving-up ceremony and Christos’s father couldn’t see little Christos’s face because of the phone. Words had been exchanged. Chests had been puffed out.

At their kindergarten moving-up ceremony.

The hostility had only gotten worse since, like black mold growing in hidden places for years.

But if that was the urgent matter, it made no sense that Eden Montgomery would be here or that Mr. M would be involved. He was the music teacher—uncontroversial at best. Marwan put his earbuds in and clicked play. The Stitcher lady said, “Resuming episode,” in her calming, robotic way.

It was a pretty solid unsolved mystery about a former beauty queen in Georgia who’d disappeared without a trace—the sort of podcast Marwan really devoured lately and hoped to maybe produce one day, even if it was morbid to want a career in true crime. Maybe he’d find another topic down the line but so far had no ideas because nothing ever happened to him. Not the way it happened to the people who ended up on StoryCorps or The Moth or This American Life. People had crazy lives out there for sure, and it somehow made Marwan’s life feel smaller but also bigger when he listened in on them.

Eden murmured something so he paused his episode again.

“What?” he asked without taking out his earbuds. An old friend of the beauty queen’s had just come out of the woodwork, and he really needed to find out what she had to say.

“What do you think that is?” Eden nodded toward the front of the room. “That thing on the desk.”

Marwan turned and saw the black cube she must have been referring to. “Don’t know,” he said. “Bluetooth speaker thing or something?” He shrugged and hit play again.

He had a few texts from his father. Reminders about things to pick up on his way to work. Or things to do at the restaurant if he got there before his father did.

And whoa the best friend had just dropped a bomb of new information about the night the beauty queen disappeared. Something that threw the whole imagined timeline of the crime way off.