Benji is five-eleven, but Mr. Shaw is a giant at six-five and can hold the hat higher than most people. His jacket sleeve forms a curtain that hangs over Benji’s face as Benji jumps up to grab it.

It’s a loud and humiliating sight, which would be worse if people actually knew that we were brothers. You couldn’t guess it because Benji’s heavy like a linebacker, with a warm beige skin tone and a smooth wave pattern. I’m two inches shorter, skinny as a pole, with golden-brown skin and two different hair textures—nappy on the sides, curly on top.

Mr. Shaw is guiding Benji in the direction of the principal’s office as I slip into my first class. Benji’s arguing the whole time, not letting it go, asserting his right to dress how he wants. Sometimes I wish I could be like him—more in charge of myself.Instead, I’m silent all the time.

When Mom used to ask me what I learned in school, I couldn’t tell her. I still couldn’t, because it’s hard to pay attention when you live in hiding at the back of the classroom.

Dead world appears around me like a subaquatic wasteland of lost matter—failed tests, rusty trophies, dismembered trumpets, and ripped baseballs. Lost memories floating through the walls, over everybody’s heads, and out the other side. The phantoms blur together in a drone of chaos I’ve trained myself to ignore. That guy in the tweed vest who breaks the school chair over another dude’s neck in chemistry. That awkward moment in econ when a car crashes through the wall and just sits there with phantom bricks like visual static on its windshield, obscuring the bloody person inside. The lights blink so bright they block the board.

I wanted classes only on the second floor to avoid proximity to roads. And the third floor is too high, because the ghosts up there jump out of windows.

I am always focused on drawing. My notebooks are filled with demented sketches that normal people would call weird. Robots with spider legs and worms crawling out of eyeballs. Eyeballs with giant bellies. A boy with a bloated, bleeding heart for a head.

The final bell brings me home. The glockenspiel does its ding dong ding thing, and my eyes waken to my second reality—the one where ceiling lights blast through ghosts so hard I can barely see them. And the world is replaced by kids who don’t know my name.