Our friendship never really settled in—it’s actually a long-lasting accident, which started at the courtyard tables last year, when he invited himself to sit next to me. I was reading. He asked me what I was reading. My solitude ended, and I’ve never gotten it back.

A whistle shrieks from the field. Coach Kelly’s got his blue eyes set on me. His neck is stiff, and the bill of his hat hides the top half of his face. He’s pumping his arms in slow motion, pantomiming proper running. It’s so condescending.

I hate it here. Every time we run warm-up laps it’s like there’s a BLACK KID sign blinking above my head like a firetruck light, alerting the coaches of my whereabouts on the track. They are always keeping their eyes on me. Most days I want to run off this campus, find shelter in the woods, and spend a few years not being perceived, just to recover from the trauma of being hyper-visible.

And most days? I can’t figure out what I hate more: seeing the dead or being the one Black eleventh grader at St. Clair Prep.

I change into my uniform in the stall of the second-floor bathroom. Here is the best place to escape from all the shirt thrashing and butt slapping of the boys’ the locker room. Covering the walls are stickers for clubs I will never be a part of. Varsity Crew, Math League, St. Clair Democrats, St. Clair Republicans. They’re all slapped over each other like each club is competing for dominance, forming a big psychedelic collage of red, white, and blue. All surrounding a doodle of Mr. Krabs, captioned Krabs is one thicc bih.

The stall door clacks behind me as I approach a sink mirror—one of three hung on a blue wall of ceramic tiles. All that it shows me is that I’m not much to look at.

On my way out of the bathroom, I hear my brother shouting.

“Give me back my shit, man!”

The hallway traffic is buzzing like a chaos of katydids. Jocks, band geeks, and loners all wear the same navy-blue blazers, sucking all the culture out of the place. You can only tell who’s in what clique by the clusters that form in front of lockers and by the fact that jocks wear their blazers open.

My brother doesn’t wear the blazer at all. He wears whatever he wants. I stop walking when I see him arguing with my chem teacher, Mr. Shaw, on the landing past the glass at the end of the hall.

Mr. Shaw is holding my brother’s snapback out of reach. “No hats in the building. It is against the dress code.”

“It’s not a hat! It’s a headband. Show me where the dress code says no headbands, bruh.”