“I’ve been looking all over for you,” he says. “I just want to get this out of the way now. What I said yesterday—”

“No one’s going to say anything,” I tell him.

He relaxes. “Okay. Good.”

I flip Baxter’s agenda open and closed while they just stand there. Flip to the first page. Nick Baxter. Phone and cell phone numbers. Address. Nick Baxter.

Nick.

“Oh,” I say.

“What?” Rhys asks.

The world breaks into a million pieces and comes back together just as quickly but it comes back together wrong. The picture is wrong. Upside down, awful. I stand slowly and move around Baxter’s desk, instinct guiding me. I feel like my brain is shutting down or waking up in a way it’s never been awake before. I move along the back of the room and come to the closet. I open the door and everything stops. Everything. Rhys and Cary get so quiet, I’m afraid they disappeared or they were never here at all and I think I made this moment happen, I willed this man into existence.

Mr. Baxter.

He’s curled up on the floor, asleep. He’s not even a ghost of the person he used to be. There is nothing of our teacher left in him. That steady, solid frame that stood over all of us and kept us quiet has now shrunk in on itself, somehow. His cheeks are hollow and his face is so pale that if he wasn’t breathing, I’d think he was dead. He’s wearing a suit. A dress shirt, ripped and covered in blood and muck. He’s alive. Seeing someone else in this school, alive, is almost too much. I’m afraid of it. I’m afraid of this ravaged man.

“Get the gun, Sloane,” Rhys says.

I’m too shocked to understand what he’s saying.

“The gun—get it!”

That’s when I notice the handgun resting in Baxter’s lap. It’s angled weirdly toward me, sends my heart into a furious rhythm. I reach forward slowly. My fingers get way too close to my English teacher’s crotch in the process and that alone makes my stomach turn. Mr. Baxter’s eyes flicker. I scramble back with the gun in my hands and Rhys is behind me, ripping it from my grasp, which makes me realize all the things I can do with a gun.

“Holy shit,” Rhys says.

I’m so overcome with the urge to say I told you so. I told you someone was in here. Then my brain spazzes out. Someone else is in here. Someone else got in.

Rhys and Cary stare at this lump of a human being—another human being in this school with us, an adult—and have no idea what to do.

Cary turns to us. “How did he get in?” Before either of us can answer, he strides forward and kicks Baxter, who is slowly waking up, in the legs.

“Cary—” Rhys reaches for him, but it’s too late.

Baxter moans. Cary nudges him with his foot again and I move farther away because I don’t want to be close to this. I want to be as far from it as I can.