The walk home was long enough that I usually rode my bicycle to school. My parents made me wear a helmet that was huge and white and egg-looking. Before the time change the sun wasn’t up when I’d start, so I’d pedal along in the cold half-light. I’d try not to get run down by cars that probably couldn’t see me even with the egg on my head.

I didn’t have any close calls that morning. At one stoplight a black jeep pulled up—stopping and lurching like it couldn’t stand to be reined in. Like it had to menace at the next car’s bumper like an idiot dog. The stereo was up loud but only an angry, phlegmy growl came though the sealed windows. The light changed and the jeep jumped and the tires tore at the pavement just a few feet away from where I stood.

I got near the school and then veered onto a side street like I did every morning. Like every morning I took off my bag, took off my helmet, stuffed the helmet in the bag and pulled the bag back over my shoulders. With the helmet in my bag I rode the last two blocks past the kids getting off buses and out of their parents’ cars. The edge of the sun burned my eyes from behind a building while I leaned over to lock the bike.

Mrs. Flatworth hadn’t changed our seats. I was still stuck with the elite kids, and every morning they resented me all over again. I felt Ericka Anderson’s eyes on me, but she ignored me once Todd Spade arrived.

“Todd! Oh my God! Sunday! My dad won’t even speak to me!”

He had a little giggle when he laughed. The giggle cracked his voice a little, and that always made girls smile at him. He had big brown eyes and a sharp jaw.

“It’s not funny.” She was only play-angry.

“I didn’t make you get in Lloyd’s car.”

“You got in first!”

“My dad’s not mad at me.”

She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling at the same time.

“I was pissing myself when I first heard that siren. I was praying. ‘I’ll never drink again! Please!’” Todd did the laugh again, and the giggle.

“Look what they let me keep.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small cylinder of whitish plastic.

Jenie Berman came in then, and when she saw Jenie’s plastic she pulled out one of her own. It was the cops that had let her keep it—the mouthpiece from a breathalyzer. “Hey Ericka didn’t you think he was kind of cute?”

“The cop?”

“No, Lloyd.”

Todd laughed. “What? He’s like nineteen. He would rip you in half.”

“I’m not saying I want to get together with him. But he was cute.”

“I’ll tell your dad.”

“Shut up!” I could always tell what Todd was going to say before he said it. I wondered where she found all that enthusiasm—if it was just more fun for her to pretend he was roguish instead of obvious. He kept on giggling and playing his part.

They never seemed to mind that I heard everything they said. It was almost like participating, the way their lives changed from day to day as I eavesdropped. But on Saturday, when they were getting their zero-tolerance alcohol tests, I was asleep after watching a movie on TV. My mom had read in the other room, under the orange lamplight that the closed white blinds held inside the house. The movie was a shoddy, twenty-year-old comedy, shown with low-rent ads on an unaffiliated broadcast channel—ads for tire replacement and debt consolidation.

I used to wonder how long it would be until I would drink and have sex—whether I’d be some pathetic twenty-year-old, or even then. The kids on TV went on dates at my age, but it was hard to imagine how I could ever have found myself on a date.

I heard about some real life kids my age who had a plan to kill the members of N*Sync. They said N*Sync got all the best girls. They called their plan Operation Death Strike, but they were found out before they could pull it off.

But for all the things missing from my life, for all the reasons Todd Spade had probably had sex with both of the girls sitting two rows in front of me, for all my resentment toward him, and them, and Mrs. Flatworth, my mom, that guy Lloyd—still, it was hard for me to imagine that I could have pinned it all on N*Sync. That just didn’t make sense.

“Ok. Let’s get started.” Mrs. Flatworth repeated that, louder each time, but with no expression on her sagging face. “Ok, everyone. Let’s get started.” There was a TV cart at the front of the room—that meant we’d get to watch a video. Once she had everyone’s attention, she pressed play. The cart was rickety and it flexed away from her buttonpushing. It looked ready to crush the first kid who didn’t obey the safety stickers.

She went to the back of the room and pulled down the creased white blinds, fighting with them and scraping them against the heater so they’d stick. I felt a sudden, overwhelming desire that she not exist. I hoped she’d try to return the TV cart herself and it would fall on her. She seemed dead enough already—as if it wouldn’t have made any difference.

When it started, the sound from the video was loud and nasty, rattling around inside the small plastic gratings on the sides of the television. The video was called Egypt’s Tombs: Time Capsules of the Sun God. It was boring, but at least it went the whole period.

Five minutes before the end of class I saw Bud Wright duck his head in the door and whisper something. Bud Wright was the assistant principal. He insisted that everyone call him “Bud,” but I would just as soon have called him “Mr.” Mrs. Flatworth turned on the lights, and the stuttering, green-gray brightness hurt my eyes. She stopped the video, too, just before the end: “But it’s because of these elaborate burial rites that we’ve been able to learn—”

Bud Wright went out the door and then came back with a kid I’d never seen before. The kid was small and thin with shaggy black hair that didn’t match the close style of all the other guys. He had on brand new sneakers that were too white and the front of his shirt was tucked in. He had a defiant expression on his face—looking us all over like he’d be getting into trouble soon.

He looked like a dropout loser except for his face. His face was narrow and bony, not disproportioned like most of the ninth graders. It was a face like a cartoon, like you could draw with just a few heavy black strokes: cheek, nose, jaw, everything in its place. His eyes were gray and the defiance seemed to come from somewhere inside them—as if it were our shoes and shirts and hair that was wrong, and not his own.

“It looks like we have just enough time to introduce a new student. This is ...” Mrs. Flatworth trailed off and turned to Bud Wright.

“Quentin Thomas. Quentin is joining us from ...” But he stumbled, too.

“Baltimore. I’m from Baltimore.”

“—from Baltimore, and I’m sure you’ll all give him a warm Wildcat Welcome if you see him in some of your other classes.”

Mrs. Flatworth paused to see if he would say anything else, but he didn’t. “And, your homework assignment due Monday—”

People stopped putting away their things so that they could write down the assignment, and Mrs. Flatworth waited. She didn’t give us many papers to write because she was lazy and slow to grade them. Next to videos, her favorite use of class time was to have us read aloud. She never seemed to be bothered by the stumbling arrhythmia of all the kids’ bad reading, or bothered that we could all have read it silently in a quarter the time.

“Your assignment is a five paragraph expository essay. Imagine that you’re a prince—or princess—in ancient Egypt. You’ve just died, and your family wants to give you a fancy burial. Tell us what objects they include in your tomb, and why. And make sure you follow your essay guidelines handout and include your thesis statement and supporting paragraphs and your concluding paragraph. Now does anyone have any questions?”

“Why do we always have to do these gay essays?”

“Does anyone besides Kenneth have any questions?”

The bell rang, and people jumped toward the door. They’d already forgotten the weird scene with the new kid. Then Mrs. Flatworth raised her voice a little. “Aleks, could you come up here?”

I stopped and turned to the front of the class. I tried to think what I might have done, but I never did anything. The rest of the kids kept filing out.

“Aleks, your schedule is the same as Quentin’s, so he’s going to shadow you today. Please show him around, and try to be nice?”

Bud Wright made a point of looking me in the eye and nodding. He said, “Ok. Thanks buddy,” and he left.

Quentin stayed where Bud Wright had left him. I looked at him and realized he’d be watching me all day, and everyone else would be watching too because he’d be tethered to my side. I wondered if Mrs. Flatworth expected me to introduce him to people. I didn’t ask her, and I didn’t ask Quentin if he expected me to have friends. He stood there next to her like a little dog, without saying anything, with an empty half-smile on his face.

“Hi Aleks,” he said, full of stupid courtesy. “I’m Quentin.”