It was true. Her classroom mural, with some directed help from Elliot, who also documented the daily progress in photographs, was a wonder to see come to life. At some point, every student in the school stopped by the class to watch her paint, especially Sean and Elliot and me, who ate lunch watching her each day until it was finished. It was another gorgeous wave of water and sky and light, lit by the art classroom’s wall of windows. She was so proud.

Her smile was infectious. Especially when Elliot was around. He was sweet with her, tall and protective. He posed for her oil paint and pastel portraits, she for his million photographs.

I was caught off guard by how happy her happiness made me.

And how it incensed Katiana. They skulked in the art room when Kira worked on the mural, and they stalked around the cafeteria like unfixed cats, marking their territory and glaring at anyone who did not fall in line, including and especially the four of us—Elliot, Kira, Sean, and me—eating together in the lunchroom once the mural was complete.

“Aren’t they exhausted, monitoring your every movement like that?” I asked. “Is it bonkers with them in art class?”

“We’re getting better at ignoring them,” Elliot said.

“They spend a lot of time in the corner talking about how paint is a worthless medium and making these sculpted wire things, kind of like a nest all tangled and strung with colored glass, suspended from the ceiling? Which, I mean…they’re really beautiful, to be honest.” She stole a few chips from Elliot’s plate and sat there chewing while we all stared at her. She looked up. “What?”

“Teach me your ways,” sighed Sean, who had stopped tutoring or even speaking to Katiana the moment I told him they’d been torturing Kira. He never asked me for evidentiary details, just wholly believed my word and was now actively pissed off at them on Kira’s behalf.

It was things like that—my joy in Kira’s happiness, her and Sean’s constant unquestioning belief that I was always telling the truth—that made me wish, for brief moments, that I was not aging out. That I could somehow stay, even just a little while longer. Time was flying.

“I mean,” Elliot said, “you’re not wrong about the wire things. But it’s hard for me to appreciate the beauty in anything even remotely related to Katiana when they’re such…”

“Soulless monsters?” Kira said. “Oh, for sure. In perpetuity.”

There’s my girl.

She smiled. “I think I’m just too busy—and dare I say, happy—to give a shit.”

“Cheers to that,” I said.