Mr. Spille, second-period American history, is PDHS’s resident drunk teacher. Never straying far from his desk, he delivers his lecture to us on gusts of minty breath spray with base notes of bourbon. We learn about Harpers Ferry for fifteen minutes until an earnest-faced boy diverts him into a period-long conversation about the Patriots’ draft picks. I doodle in my notebook until the bell rings. It’s restful.

Hot lunch is slices of anemic turkey, a scoop of instant potatoes with gravy, and green beans drowning in their own bodily fluids. Thank God I brown-bag it. I peel back the tinfoil on my sandwich, the crust an inch from my mouth when I notice the white specks. Bread’s gone bad.

Someone put a sticker on my back. Elmo, holding a gold star, smiling gapingly, with the words Good Job! underneath. I have no idea how long it’s been there.

My study hall is in Mrs. Klatts’s room, which has a western exposure, facing an overgrown field bleeding into woods. I’m about to open A Clockwork Orange—the rest of my junior English class has already read through page one hundred—when instinct flicks my ear, making me look up at the exact second Bree and Sage sprint across the field, legs pumping, heading for the cover of a single stand of yew trees.

I glance at Klatts, buried in her planner, the bowed heads of the other kids. I’m the only one seeing this, at least in room twelve.

Bree and Sage crouch out of sight, then pelt toward the woods. A moment later, they’re gone. I wait for teachers to give chase, for sirens and searchlights. Nothing. The clock over the whiteboard ticks on.

I spend the rest of study hall with my chin resting on my folded arms, staring after them.

Shocker: Bree and Sage don’t get on the bus at the end of the day.

I slouch in my seat. Decompression. Or maybe decomposition? Gazing out the rain-speckled window, I register a transition from light to shadow as we drive beneath an overpass. That’s when I notice the writing.

Four feet tall, somehow spray-painted across the underside of the pass; the tagger must’ve hung upside down from the girders like a bat. The message makes me turn even though it’s too late, we’re through, back in the gray light.

The words said Fear Him.

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