“‘I do not think that they will sing to me!’” Dorian spat it out aggressively and dropped the book with a crash. The rest of the students in the tiny class were staring, too shocked to laugh. But what did they know, anyway? “This poem is garbage! It’s all lies!”

“Dorian . . .”

“If he’d heard the mermaids singing, he wouldn’t be blathering on like this! He would be dead! Is this poem just trying to pretend that people don’t have to die?”

Mrs. Muggeridge didn’t even look angry. Somewhere between alarmed and amused.

“If you could read on to the end, Dorian, I think you’ll see that T. S. Eliot isn’t trying to evade intimations of mortality.” Students started snickering at that. She always used such weird words. It was a mystery to him how Mrs. Muggeridge had wound up in this town. She was even more out of place than he was, with her dragging black clothes and odd ideas.

“No!” Dorian didn’t remember getting out of his chair, but he was standing now. His legs were shaking violently, and the room seemed unsteady. Mrs. Muggeridge looked at him carefully.

“Maybe you should step out of the room for a few minutes?” He couldn’t understand why she had to react so calmly. It wasn’t fair, not when she’d made him read those horrible lines. He stalked out of class, leaving his English anthology with its pages splayed and crushed against the floor. In the hallway he pressed his forehead against the cold tile wall. His breathing was fast and hungry, as if he’d just come up from under the deep gray slick of the ocean.

He could hear Mrs. Muggeridge serenely reading on. “‘We have lingered in the chambers of the sea, by sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown. Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’”

He felt like he was going to faint. But at least the poem got something right. Maybe he’d survived the sinking of the Dear Melissa, but he still felt like he was drowning all the time. Every time his alarm clock went off, he lunged bolt upright in bed, gasping for air.

When the class finally poured out into the hall, he straightened himself and trailed after them to chemistry. It was such a suffocating, sleepy, ragtag school, with only sixty students and three teachers. His high school in the Chicago suburbs had been twenty times the size of this place. Everything felt crushingly small.

Other students turned to stare at the two men in dark suits standing near a drinking fountain, but Dorian didn’t notice them. He was concentrating on fighting the wobbly sensation of the floor.