All the Birds in the Sky

3

THE CLASSROOMS ON the western side of Canterbury Academy’s pale cement mausoleum had windows facing the parking lot, the sports fields, and the two-lane highway. But the east windows looked down a muddy slope to a stream, beyond which an uneven fringe of trees shivered in the September wind. In the school’s stale-marshmallow-scented air, Patricia could look east and imagine running wild.

The first week of school, Patricia smuggled an oak leaf in her skirt pocket — the nearest thing she had to a talisman, which she touched until it broke into crumbs. All through Math and English, her two classes with views of the east, she watched the stub of forest. And wished she could escape there and go fulfill her destiny as a witch, instead of sitting and memorizing old speeches by Rutherford B. Hayes. Her skin crawled under her brand-new training bra, stiff sweater, and school jumper, while around her kids texted and chattered: Is Casey Hamilton going to ask Traci Burt out? Who tried what over the summer? Patricia rocked her chair up and down, up and down, until it struck the floor with a clang that startled everyone at her group table.

Seven years had passed since some birds had told Patricia she was special. Since then, she’d tried every spellbook and every mystical practice on the internet. She’d misplaced herself in the woods over and over until she knew by heart every way to get lost. She carried a first-aid kit, in case she met any more injured creatures. But no wild things ever spoke, and nothing magical ever happened. As if the whole thing had been some kind of prank, or she’d failed a test without knowing.

Patricia walked through the playground after lunch with her face upcast, trying to keep pace with an unkindness of ravens passing over the school. The ravens gossiped among themselves, without letting Patricia in on their conversation — just like the kids at this school, not that Patricia cared.

She’d tried to make friends, because she’d promised her mom (and witches kept their promises, she guessed) — but she was joining this school in the eighth grade, after everyone else had been here a couple years. Just yesterday, she’d stood at the girls’ room sink next to Macy Firestone and her friends as Macy obsessed about Brent Harper blowing her off at lunch. Macy’s bright lip gloss perfectly set off her Creamsicle hair dye. Patricia, coating her hands with oily-green fake soap, had been seized by a conviction that she, too, ought to say something funny and supportive about the appeal, and yet the tragic insufficiency, of Brent Harper, who had twinkly eyes and moussed-up hair. So she’d stammered that Brent Harper was The Worst — and at once she had girls on both sides of her, demanding to know exactly what her problem was with Brent Harper. What had Brent ever done to her? Carrie Danning spat so hard, her perfect blond hair almost lost a barrette.

The ravens flew in no formation Patricia could discern, even though most of the school’s lessons, this first week, had been about finding patterns in everything. Patterns were how you answered standardized-test questions, how you committed large blocks of text to memory, and ultimately how you created structure in your life. (This was the famous Saarinian Program.) But Patricia looked at the ravens, loquacious in their hurry to go nowhere, and could find no sense to any of it. They retraced their path, as if they were going to notice Patricia after all, then looped back toward the road.

What was the point of telling Patricia she was a witch, and then leaving her alone? For years?

Chasing the ravens, Patricia forgot to look down, until she collided with someone. She felt the impact and heard the yelp of distress before she saw whom she’d run over: a gangly boy with sandy hair and an oversized chin, who’d fallen against the chicken-wire fence at the playground’s edge and rebounded onto the grass. He pulled himself upright. “Why the hell don’t you look where you’re—” He glanced at something on his left wrist that wasn’t a watch, and cursed way too loud.

“What is it?” Patricia said.

“You broke my time machine.” He yanked it off his wrist and showed her.

“You’re Larry, right?” Patricia looked at the device, which was definitely broken. There was a jagged crack in its casing and a sour odor coming from inside it. “I’m really sorry about your thing. Can you get another? I can totally pay for it. Or my parents can, I guess.” She was thinking that her mom would love that, another disaster to make up for.

“Buy another time machine.” Larry snorted. “You’re going to, what, just walk down to Best Buy and get a time machine off the rack?” He had a faint scent of cranberries, maybe from some body spray or something.

“Don’t be sarcastic,” Patricia said. “Sarcasm is for feeble people.” She hadn’t meant that to rhyme, plus it had sounded more profound in her head.

“Sorry.” He squinted at the wreckage, then carefully unpeeled the strap from his bony wrist. “It can be repaired, I guess. I’m Laurence, by the way. Nobody calls me Larry.”

“Patricia.” Laurence held out his hand and she hoisted it three times. “So was that actually a time machine?” she asked. “You’re not joking or whatever?”

“Yeah. Sort of. It wasn’t that great. I was going to toss it out soon in any case. It was supposed to help me escape from all this. But instead, all it did was turn me into a one-trick pony.”

“Better than being a no-trick pony.” Patricia looked up again at the sky. The ravens were long gone, and all she saw was a single slowly disintegrating cloud.

AFTER THAT, PATRICIA saw Laurence around. He was in some of Patricia’s classes. She noticed that Laurence had fresh poison-ivy scars on both skinny arms and a red bite on his ankle that he kept raising his pant leg to inspect during English class. His knapsack had a compass and map spilling out of the front pouches, and grass and dirt stains along its underside.

A few days after she wrecked his time machine, she saw Laurence sitting after school on the back steps near the big slope, hunched over a brochure for a Great Outdoors Adventure Weekend. She couldn’t even imagine: Two whole days away from people and their garbage. Two days of feeling the sun on her face! Patricia stole into the woods behind the spice house every chance she got, but her parents would never let her spend a whole weekend.

“That looks amazing,” she said, and Laurence twitched as he realized she was looking over his shoulder.

“It’s my worst nightmare,” he said, “except it’s real.”

“You’ve already gone on one of these?”

Laurence didn’t respond, except to point to a blurry photo on the back of the leaflet, in which a group of kids hoisted backpacks next to a waterfall, putting on smiles except for one gloomy presence in the rear: Laurence, wearing a ridiculous round green hat, like a sport fisherman’s. The photographer had captured Laurence in the middle of spitting out something.

“But that’s awesome,” Patricia said.

Laurence got up and walked back into the school, shoes scuffing the floor.

“Please,” Patricia said. “I just … I wish I had someone to talk to, about stuff. Even if nobody can ever understand the things I’ve seen. I would settle for just knowing someone else who is close to nature. Wait. Don’t walk away. Laurence!”

He turned around. “You got my name right.” His eyes narrowed.

“Of course I did. You told it to me.”

“Huh.” He rolled that around in his mouth for a moment. “So what’s so great about nature?”

“It’s real. It’s messy. It’s not like people.” She talked to Laurence about the congregations of wild turkeys in her backyard and the vines that clung to the walls of the graveyard down the road, Concord grapes all the sweeter for their proximity to the dead. “The woods near here are full of deer and even a few elk, and the deer have almost no predators left. A fully grown buck can be the size of a horse.” Laurence looked horrified at that idea.

“You’re not really selling it,” Laurence said. “So … you’re outdoorsy, huh?”

Patricia nodded.

“Maybe there’s a way we can help each other. Let’s make a deal: You help me convince my parents I’m already spending plenty of time in nature, so they stop sending me frakking camping all the time. And I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

“You want me to lie to your parents?” Patricia wasn’t sure if that was the sort of thing an honorable witch would do.

“Yes,” he said. “I want you to lie to my parents. Thirty bucks, okay? That’s pretty much my entire supercomputer fund.”

“Let me think about it,” Patricia said.

This was a major ethical dilemma. Not just the lying, but also the part where she would be keeping Laurence from an important experience his parents wanted him to have. She couldn’t know what would happen. Maybe Laurence would invent a new windmill that would power whole cities, after observing the wings of dragonflies. She pictured Laurence years from now, accepting a Nobel Prize and saying he owed it all to the Great Outdoors Adventure Weekends. On the other hand, maybe Laurence would go on one of those weekends, fall into a waterfall, and drown, and it would be partly Patricia’s fault. Plus, she could use thirty bucks.

Meanwhile, Patricia kept trying to make other friends. Dorothy Glass was a gymnast, like Patricia’s mom had been, and the mousy, freckled girl also wrote poetry on her phone when she thought nobody was looking. Patricia sat next to Dorothy at Convocation, when Mr. Dibbs, the vice principal, talked about the school’s “No Scooters” policy and explained why rote memorization was the best way to repair the short attention spans of kids who had been raised on Facebook and video games. The whole time, Patricia and Dorothy whispered about the webtoon everyone was watching, the one with the pipe-smoking horse. Patricia felt a stirring of hope — but then Dorothy sat with Macy Firestone and Carrie Danning at lunch and looked right past Patricia in the hallway afterward.

And so Patricia marched up to Laurence as he waited for the bus. “You’re on,” she said. “I’ll be your alibi.”

LAURENCE REALLY WAS building a supercomputer in his locked bedroom closet, behind a protective layer of action figures and paperbacks. The computer was cobbled together from tons of parts, including the GPUs from a dozen pQ game consoles, which had sported the most advanced vector graphics and complex narrative branching of any system ever, during the three months they were on the market. He’d also snuck into the offices of a defunct game developer two towns over and “rescued” some hard drives, a few motherboards, and some assorted routers. The result was bursting out of its metal corrugated rack space, LEDs blazing behind piles of junk. Laurence showed all of this to Patricia, while explaining his theories about neural networks, heuristic contextual mapping, and rules of interaction, and reminding her that she had promised to tell nobody about this.

At dinner with Laurence’s parents (super-garlicky pasta), Patricia talked a good game about how she and Laurence had gone rock climbing and they had even seen a fox, up close. She almost said the fox ate out of Laurence’s hand, but she didn’t want to oversell. Laurence’s parents were overjoyed and startled to hear how many trees Laurence had been up — neither of them looked like they’d hiked in years, but they had some hang-up about Laurence spending too much time sitting at his computer instead of filling his lungs. “So glad Laurence has a friend,” said his mom, who wore cat eye glasses and had her curls dyed an obscene shade of red. Laurence’s dad, who was morose and bald except for one brown tuft, nodded and offered Patricia more garlic bread with both hands. Laurence’s family lived in a dingy subdivision in an ugly cul-de-sac, and all the furniture and appliances were old. You could see through the carpet to the cinder floor.

Patricia and Laurence started spending time together, even when she wasn’t vouching for his outdoorsiness. They sat next to each other on the bus, on a field trip to the Cannery Museum, which was a whole facility devoted to cans. And every time they hung out, Laurence showed her another weird device — like, he had built a ray gun that would make you sleepy if he aimed it at you for half an hour. He hid it under the table at school and tested it on Mr. Knight, the Social Studies teacher, who did start yawning right before the bell.

One day in English class, Ms. Dodd asked Patricia to get up and talk about William Saroyan — no, wait, just to recite William Saroyan from memory. She stumbled over the gravel road of words about the insects who live in fruit, until she noticed a light shining in her eye, blinding her, but only on the right side. With her left eye, she saw the wall of bored faces, drawing not enough entertainment at her discomfort, and then she found the source of the dazzling blue-green beam: Laurence had something in his hand. Like a pointer.

“I–I have a headache,” Patricia said. She was excused.

In the hallway during Passing Period, she yanked Laurence away from the drinking fountain and demanded to know what the hell that had been.

“Retinal teleprompter,” Laurence gasped, looking actually scared of her. Nobody had ever been scared of Patricia. “Still not quite perfected. If it had worked, it would have projected the words directly onto your eye.”

Patricia felt actually scandalized at this. “Oh. But isn’t that cheating?”

“Yes, because memorizing the speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes will prepare you for life as an adult.” Laurence rolled his eyes and walked away.

Laurence wasn’t sitting around feeling sorry for himself, he was making things. She had never met anyone like him before. And meanwhile, what could Patricia do with her so-called magic powers? Nothing. She was totally useless.

4

LAURENCE’S PARENTS DECIDED Patricia was his girlfriend, and they wouldn’t hear reason. They kept offering to chaperone the two kids to school dances, or to drive them to and from “dates.” They wouldn’t shut up about it.

Laurence wanted to shrink to nothing.

“Here’s the thing about dating at your age.” Laurence’s mom sat facing him as he ate breakfast. His dad had already gone to work. “It doesn’t count. It’s just like practice. Training wheels. You know this isn’t going to amount to anything. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important.” She was wearing sweatpants with a blouse.

“Thanks for your input, Mom. I appreciate all of your keen insights.”

“You always make fun of your poor mother.” She swept her hands in opposite waves. “But you ought to listen. Puppy love is when you learn game, or you never do. You’re already a nerd, honey, you just don’t want to be a nerd with no dating skills. So I’m just saying, you shouldn’t let thoughts about the future keep you from making the most of your middle-school fling. Listen to one who knows.” Laurence’s mom had gone to her fifth-choice grad school instead of her first choice, to be closer to his dad, and that had been the first of many compromises that had ended them up here.

“She’s not my girlfriend, Mom. She’s just someone who’s teaching me to appreciate tick bites.”

“Well, maybe you should do something about that. She seemed like a very sweet girl. Very well brought up. She had nice hair. I would make a move if I were you.”

Laurence felt so uncomfortable in this conversation, not just his skin was crawling — his bones, his ligaments, his blood vessels were crawling, too. He felt pinned to his stiff wooden chair. At last he understood what all those old horror stories meant when they talked about an eldritch dread, creeping into your very soul. That was how Laurence felt, listening to his mother attempt to talk to him about girls.

Even worse was when Laurence heard the other kids at school whispering about him and Patricia. When Laurence was in the locker room before PE, kids who normally paid zero attention to him, jocks like Blaze Donovan, started asking him if he’d gotten her shirt off yet. And offering him make-out advice that sounded like it came from the internet. Laurence kept his head down and tuned them out. He couldn’t believe he’d lost his time machine, just when he needed it most.

One day, Laurence and Patricia were sitting adjacent to each other at lunch — not “with” each other, just adjacent to each other, at the same long table where boys mostly sat at one end and girls at the other. Laurence leaned over and asked, “People think we’re … you know … boyfriend-girlfriend. Doesn’t that kind of weird you out?” He tried to sound as though he thought it was no big deal, but he was just expressing concern about Patricia’s feelings.

Patricia just shrugged. “I guess people are always going to have something, right?” She was this weird fidgety girl, with eyes that looked brown sometimes and green sometimes, and dark straight hair that never defrizzed.

Laurence didn’t really need to hang out with Patricia at school, because he only needed her to vouch for his after-school time, and maybe weekends. But he felt awkward sitting by himself when she was also sitting by herself, usually frowning out the nearest window. And he found himself curious to ask her stuff and see how she responded — because he never, ever knew what Patricia would say about anything. He only knew it would be something weird.

LAURENCE AND PATRICIA sat under the up escalator at the mall. They each had a Double Chocolate Ultra Creamy Super Whip Frostuccino with decaf coffee in it, which made them feel super grown up. They were lulled by the machinery working right over their heads, the wheel of steps going around forever, and they had a view of the big fountain, which made a friendly splashing noise. Soon both their drinks were nothing but throaty snorty noises as they took the last pulls on their straws, and they were both blitzed on sugar.

They could see the feet and ankles of people passing on the down escalator, between them and the fountain. They took turns trying to guess who these people were, based just on their footwear.

“That lady in the white sneakers is an acrobat. And a spy,” Patricia said. “She travels around the world, doing performances and planting cameras in top-secret buildings. She can sneak in anywhere because she’s a contortionist as well as an acrobat.”

A man in cowboy boots and black jeans came past, and Laurence said this was a rodeo champion who had been challenged to a Dance Dance Revolution showdown against the world’s best break-dancer and it was happening at this very mall.

A girl in UGG boots was a supermodel who had stolen the secret formula for hair so shiny it brainwashed anyone who saw it, said Patricia, and she was hiding at the mall, where nobody would ever expect a supermodel to go.

Laurence thought the two women in smart pumps and nylons were life coaches who were coaching each other, creating an endless feedback loop.

The man in black slippers and worn gray socks was an assassin, said Patricia, a member of a secret society of trained killers who stalked their prey, looking for the perfect moment to strike and kill undetected.

“It’s amazing how much you can tell about people from their feet,” said Patricia. “Shoes tell the whole story.”

“Except us,” said Laurence. “Our shoes are totally boring. You can’t tell anything about us.”

“That’s because our parents pick out our shoes,” said Patricia. “Just wait until we’re grown up. Our shoes will be insane.”

IN FACT, PATRICIA had been correct about the man in the gray socks and black shoes. His name was Theodolphus Rose, and he was a member of the Nameless Order of Assassins. He had learned 873 ways to murder someone without leaving even a whisper of evidence, and he’d had to kill 419 people to reach the number nine spot in the NOA hierarchy. He would have been very annoyed to learn that his shoes had given him away, because he prided himself on blending with his surroundings. His was the gait of a mountain lion stalking the undergrowth, clad in the most nondescript black slippers and mountaineer socks. The rest of his outfit was designed to fade into the background, from the dark jacket to the cargo pants with their bulky pockets stuffed with weapons and supplies. He kept his bony, close-shaved head down, but every one of his senses was primed. His mind ran countless battle scenarios, so that if any of the housewives, mall-walking seniors, or teenagers attacked without warning Theodolphus would be ready.

Theodolphus had come to this mall looking for two special children, because he needed a pro bono hit to keep up his standing in the Nameless Order. To that end, he had made a pilgrimage to the Assassin Shrine in Albania, where he’d fasted, inhaled vapors, and gone nine days without sleep. And then he’d stared into the ornately carved Seeing Hole in the floor of the Shrine, and he’d seen a vision of things to come that still replayed in his nightmares. Death and chaos, engines of destruction, whole cities crumbling, and a plague of madness. And at the last, a war between magic and science that would leave the world in ashes. At the center of all this were a man and a woman, who were still children now. His eyes had bled as he’d crawled away from the Seeing Hole, his palms scraped away and his knees unhinged. The Nameless Order had recently imposed a strict ban on killing minors, but Theodolphus knew this mission to be holy.

Theodolphus had lost his prey. This was the first time he had ever been inside a mall, and he was finding the environment overwhelming with all of the blaring window displays, and the confusing letter-number code on the giant map. For all Theodolphus knew, Laurence and Patricia had spotted him somehow, gotten wind of his plans, and laid an ambush. The housewares store was full of knives that moved on their own. The lingerie store had a cryptic warning about the Miracle Lift. He didn’t even know where to look.

Theodolphus was not going to lose his cool over this. He was a panther — or maybe a cheetah, some type of lethal cat, anyway — and he was just toying with these stupid children. Every assassin has moments when he or she feels the grip slipping, as though the cliff face is spinning away and a sheer drop beckons. They had talked about this very issue at the assassin convention a few months earlier: that thing where even as you pass unseen through the shadows, you fear everybody is secretly watching and laughing at you.

Breathe, panther, Theodolphus told himself. Breathe.

He went into the men’s room at the Cheesecake Factory and meditated, but someone kept pounding on the door asking if he was about done in there.

There was nothing for it but to eat a large chocolate brownie sundae. When it arrived at his table, Theodolphus stared at it — how did he know it was not poisoned? If he really was being watched, someone could have slipped any of a dozen substances into his sundae that would be odorless and flavorless, or even chocolate flavored.

Theodolphus began to sob, without making any sound. He wept like a silent jungle cat. Then at last, he decided that life would not be worth living if he couldn’t eat ice cream from time to time without worrying it was poisoned and he began to eat.

Laurence’s father came and picked up Laurence and Patricia half a mile from the mall, right around the time that Theodolphus was clutching his throat and keeling over — the ice cream had indeed been poisoned — and Patricia did what she mostly did when she talked to Laurence’s parents: make stuff up. “And we went rock climbing the other day, and white-water rafting, although the water was more brown than white. And we went to a goat farm and chased the goats until we tired them out, which let me tell you is hard, goats have energy,” Patricia told Laurence’s father.

Laurence’s father asked several goat questions, which the kids answered with total solemnity.

Theodolphus wound up banned from the Cheesecake Factory for life. That tends to happen when you thrash around and foam at the mouth in a public place while groping in the crotch of your cargo pants for something, which you then swallow in a single gulp. When the antidote kicked in and Theodolphus could breathe again, he saw his napkin had the sigil of the Nameless Order on it, with an ornate mark that more or less said, Hey, remember, we don’t kill kids anymore. Okay?

This was going to require a change of tactic.

5

WHENEVER SHE COULD, Patricia escaped to the heart of the forest. The birds laughed at her attempts to mimic them. She kicked a tree. Nothing responded. She ran deeper into the forest. “Hello? I’m here. What do you want from me? Hello!” She would have given anything to be able to transform herself, or anything else, so her world wasn’t just boring walls and boring dirt. A real witch ought to be able to do magic by instinct. She ought to be able to make mystical things happen, by sheer will, or with a profound enough belief.

A few weeks after the start of school, the frustration became too much. Patricia grabbed some dried-up spices and twigs from the basement of the spice house, went into the woods, and lit them on fire with kitchen matches. She ran around and around the tiny flame inside a shallow pit, doing nonsense chants and shaking her hands. She pulled her own hair and threw it into the flames. “Please,” she choked through tears. “Hello? Please do something. Please!” Nothing. She crouched on her heels, watching her failed enchantment turn to ash.

When Patricia got home, her sister, Roberta, was showing their parents camera-phone pictures of Patricia lighting a fire and dancing around it. Plus, Roberta had a headless squirrel inside a FoodPile bag, which she claimed was Patricia’s work. “Patricia is doing Satanic rituals in the woods,” said Roberta. “And drugs. I saw her doing drugs, too. There were shrooms. And 420. And Molly.”

“PP, we’re worried about you,” Patricia’s father said, shaking his head until his beard was a blur. “PP” was his nickname for Patricia when she was a little baby, and when they were about to punish her he would start using it again. She thought it was cute when she was little, but when she got older she decided it was a subtle reference to her failure to be a boy. “We keep hoping you’re going to start growing up. We don’t enjoy punishing you, PP, but we have to prepare you for a tough world, where—”

“What Roderick is saying is that we spent a lot of money to send you to a school with uniforms and discipline and a curriculum that creates winners,” Patricia’s mom hissed, her jaw and penciled eyebrows looking sharper than usual. “Are you determined to blow this last chance? If you just want to be garbage, just let us know, and you can go back to the woods. Just never come back to this house. You can go live in the woods forever. We could save a large sum of money.”

“We just want to see you become something, PP,” her dad chimed in.

So they grounded her indefinitely and forbade her to go into the woods ever again. This time instead of sliding food under her door, they kept sending Roberta up with a tray. Roberta put Tabasco and Sriracha chili oil on everything, no matter what.

The first night, Patricia’s mouth was burning and she couldn’t even leave her room for a glass of water. She was lonely and cold, and her parents had taken all of the stuff from her room that might entertain her, including her laptop. In her total boredom, she memorized some extra passages from her history book and she did all of the math problems, even the extra-credit ones.

The next day at school, everybody had seen the pictures of Patricia dancing around the fire, and of the squirrel with no head — because Roberta had sent them to her friends at high school, and some of Roberta’s friends had brothers and sisters who went to Canterbury. More people started giving Patricia weird looks in the hallway, and this one boy whose name Patricia didn’t even know ran up to her during Lunch Recess, yelled “Emo bitch,” and ran away. Carrie Danning and Macy Firestone, the theater kids, made a big show of checking Patricia’s wrists, because she was probably a cutter, too, and they were concerned. “We just want to make sure you’re getting the help you need,” Macy Firestone said, bright orange hair rippling around her heart-shaped face. The actual popular kids, like Traci Burt, just shook their heads and texted each other.

The second night of being grounded, Patricia started to go nuts and she was choking on the red-hot super-spicy turkey and mashed potatoes Roberta had carried up. She was coughing and rasping and wheezing. The sound of the television downstairs — too loud to ignore, too quiet to make out what anyone was saying — peeled her skull.

The weekend was the worst part of being grounded. Patricia’s parents put their own weekend plans on hold so they could keep her locked in her room. Like they had to miss an exhibition of vintage door knockers that they’d read about in one of their design magazines, which they’d been looking forward to.

If Patricia could do magic, then she could fly out her window or communicate with witches in China and Mexico. But no. She was still just boring, and bored.

Sunday came around. Patricia’s mother made a pot roast. Roberta poured Tabasco over Patricia’s portion before bringing it upstairs. Roberta unlocked the door and handed the tray to Patricia, then stood there in the doorway to watch Patricia eat. Waiting to see Patricia freak out and turn bright pink.

Instead, Patricia calmly loaded a big forkful into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. She shrugged. “It’s too bland,” she said. “I would prefer it to be spicier.” Then she handed it back to Roberta and closed her door.

Roberta took the tray back down and found a bottle of Texas extra-spicy five-alarm BBQ sauce. She splashed it onto Patricia’s pot roast until it gave off a pungent aroma.

She carried the food back up to Patricia and handed it over. Patricia chewed a bit. “Hmmm,” she said. “A little better. But still not spicy enough. I would really like something a lot spicier.”

Roberta went and got a jar of Peruvian hot pepper seeds and dotted them all over the pot roast.

Patricia felt as though her mouth was on fire after just one bite, but she forced a smile onto her face. “Hmm. I would still like it spicier. Thank you,” Patricia said.

Roberta found some chili powder on the top shelf of the downstairs pantry and put a generous scoopful onto Patricia’s dinner. She had to pull her sweater over her nose and mouth to carry it back upstairs.

Patricia considered this screaming piece of beef, which was way spicier than the spiciest thing she’d ever eaten (a five-alarm chili that had been billed as “forbidden by the Geneva cooking convention” by the roadside diner where her family had stopped last summer). She forced herself to take a big bite and chew slowly. “Sure. That’ll do. Thanks.” Roberta watched Patricia eat the whole thing, slowly — but like she was savoring it, not like she was in pain or reluctant. When it was all gone, Patricia thanked Roberta again. The door closed and Patricia was alone. She let out a fiery gasp.

Patricia’s stomach was being eaten from the inside. Her head was boiling away, and she felt faint. Everything was blinding white, and her mouth was a toxic disaster area. She was sweating red-hot oil through every inch of her skin. Most of all, her forehead hurt from pushing against the ceiling.

Wait a second. Why was her forehead up against the ceiling? Patricia could look down and see her own body, flopping around a bit. She was flying! She had left her body! Something about so much chili powder and hot oil all at once must have put her into a state. She was astral-projecting. Or something. She no longer even felt her stomach pain or any tingling in her mouth, that was for her physical body. “I love spicy food!” Patricia said with no mouth and no breath.

She flew to the woods.

She raced over the lawns and driveways, swooping and lifting, amazed at the feeling of the wind pressing through her face. Her hands and feet were pure silver. She rose higher, so the highway was a stream of brightness underneath her. The night felt cold, but not in a painful way, more like she was filling up with air.

Somehow Patricia knew the way to the place where the Parliament had met when she was a little girl. She wondered if she was dreaming all this, but it had too many funny details, like the highway construction closing one lane in the middle of the night — who would dream that up? — and it all seemed totally real.

Soon she was in front of the majestic Tree where the Parliament had met, its great wings of leaves arching over her. But there were no birds this time. The Tree just fanned in the darkness, the wind animating its fronds a little bit. Patricia had wasted a trip out of her body, because nobody was home. Just her luck.

She almost turned and flew back. But maybe the birds were in recess somewhere nearby. “Hello?” Patricia said into the darkness.

“Hell,” a voice said back, “o.”

Patricia had been standing planted in a patch of ground, but at the sound of that voice she jumped, and rose four feet in the air because she still weighed nothing. She remembered at last how to come back down to earth.

“Hello?” Patricia said again. “Who’s there?”

“You called out,” said the voice. “I answered.”

This time, Patricia could tell somehow that the voice was coming from the Tree itself. Like there was a presence there, at the center of its big trunk. There wasn’t a face or anything, just a feeling that something was watching her.

“Thank you,” Patricia said. She was getting cold, after all, in her panda pajamas. She was barefoot outdoors in the autumn night, even though this wasn’t her body.

“I have not spoken to a living person,” the Tree said, forming the words syllable by syllable, “in many seasons. You were distressed. What is wrong?” Its voice sounded like the wind blowing through an old bellows, or the lowest note playing on a big wooden recorder.

Now Patricia felt embarrassed, because suddenly her problems felt tiny and selfish, when she placed them in front of such a huge and ancient presence. “I feel like a fake witch,” she said. “I can’t do anything. At all. My friend Laurence can build supercomputers and time machines and ray guns. He can make cool things happen any time he wants. I can’t make anything cool happen.”

“Something cool,” the Tree said in a gust of vowels and a clatter of consonants, “is happening. Right now.”

“Yes,” Patricia said, ashamed again. “Yes! Definitely! This is great. Really. But this just happened on its own. I can’t make anything happen when I want it to.”

“Your friend would control nature,” said the Tree, rustling through each syllable one by one. “A witch must serve nature.”

“But,” Patricia said, thinking this through. “That’s not fair. If nature serves Laurence, and I serve nature, then it’s like I’m serving Laurence. I like Laurence, I guess, but I don’t want to be his servant.”

“Control,” the Tree said, “is an illusion.”

“Okay,” Patricia said. “So I guess I really am a witch. Right? I mean, you called me a witch just now. Plus I left my body, that counts for something. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. I know it must be hard work being a tree. Especially a Parliamentary Tree.”

“I am many trees,” the Tree said. “And many other things besides. Goodbye.”

The journey back to Patricia’s house went much faster than the outward trip, perhaps because she was much sleepier. She passed through the ceiling of her bedroom and into her body — which was twisted with horrible stomach pain, because she had eaten enough hot peppers for a hundred thousand curries.

“Aaaaaaaaa!” Patricia shouted, sitting up and clutching her stomach. “Bathroom break! Bathroom break! I need a bathroom break NOW!!!!”

ON MONDAY, SHE sat across from Laurence at lunch at the far end of one of the long tables, next to the slop cans, where the kids who had no clique of their own were stuck.

“Can you keep a secret?” she asked him.

“Sure,” Laurence said without hesitating. He was poking holes in his gray, clammy hamburger with a knife. “You already know all of my secrets.”

“Great.” Patricia lowered her voice and covered her mouth. “So listen. You probably won’t even believe any of this. I know it’s going to sound crazy. But I have to tell someone. You’re the only one I can tell.” She told the whole story, as best she could.

6

EVERY TIME LAURENCE showed Patricia another one of his inventions, he felt a crick in his neck. Sort of a charley horse, that only happened when he pulled an experimental device out of his knapsack. He wondered about this for days until he realized: He was instinctively flinching away from Patricia and lifting one shoulder. Braced for her to call him a creep.

“Here’s something I’ve been working on,” he would start to say — and then his neck would spasm. Even when he realized he was doing it, he couldn’t stop. Like part of him always flashed back to his sixth-grade Show-and-Tell disaster, the Laserscoop.

But if anything, Patricia just seemed endlessly curious. Even when he showed her the remote-controlled cyborg cockroach kit he’d ordered from the internet, one day after school. “Here’s where you connect it to the roach’s central nervous system, so it will obey all of your fiendish commands,” Laurence said, pointing at the little wires on the tiny metal wedge, fresh out of the box. A truck belched underneath the pedestrian overpass they were sitting on, so neither of them could talk until it had passed.

“Roach-borg.” Patricia looked at the roach-saddle in Laurence’s palm. “That is nuts.” She started to do a Borg voice from Star Trek: “Doritos are irrelevant.”

“So you’re not grossed out?” Laurence put it back in the box it came in, and the box back in the knapsack. He looked at her: still kind of giggling, though with a nervy edge to it. A car pulled a boat down the road. Probably the last chance for sailing this year.

Patricia considered this. “Sure, it’s kind of yuck. But not as bad as when we dissected a cow brain in Biology class. I just don’t feel sorry for a roach.” Her legs kicked against the metal underside of the bridge, through the slats in the railing. Right now, as far as Laurence’s parents knew, he and Patricia were halfway up the Crystal Lake Trail.

They both just watched the cars for a moment. Patricia had taken to rolling up the sleeves of her uniform cardigan all the time, so people could tell at a glance that she wasn’t cutting herself — she really wasn’t, okay?

“Just remember,” Patricia said in a suddenly grown-up voice, “control is an illusion.” He could see the unscathed veins in her bare forearm. He realized she was quoting the magic voice she’d talked to. “And yet,” she went on, “I’m still jealous of your toys. You just never give up. You keep on making stuff. And whenever you show off something new to me, you have this look of joy on your face.”

“Joy?” Laurence thought he had misheard for a moment. “I’m not joyful, I’m pissed off, all the time. I’m a misanthrope.” That was his new favorite word, and he had been waiting to use it in a sentence for a while.

She shrugged. “Well, you look joyful. You get all excited. I envy that.”

Laurence wondered if he could possibly cringe and be joyful at the same time. He rubbed his sore neck, first with one hand, then with both.

For some reason, Laurence believed Patricia’s story about talking to some birds and having an out-of-body experience. He was still kind of a gullible person, which had made him easy to prank at summer camp — but also, he rebelled at the idea of starting to close off possibilities in the world. If Patricia, who was sort of his friend, believed this stuff, then he wanted to support her. Also, she was suffering for her “witchcraft” and it would offend some basic sense of fairness for Laurence to think she was being punished for nothing. And really, was her story any crazier than other stuff, like the way Laurence’s body seemed to be rolling out new, totally unrequested features with alarming speed? Not really.

Plus Patricia had become pretty much the only person Laurence could talk to at school. Even the other so-called geeks at Canterbury Academy were too chickenshit to hang with Laurence, especially after he’d managed to get himself banned from the school’s computer lab (he wasn’t trying to hack anything, just make some improvements) and the school workshop (he was doing a carefully controlled flamethrower experiment). She was the only one he could laugh with about the Saarinian Program’s weird test questions (“Faith is to religion as love is to ____”), and he liked how she people-watched in the cafeteria, how her gaze turned Casey Hamilton’s student-council campaign into an amusing pageant taking place on the outskirts of fairytown.

Patricia pulled her legs out of the railing and got to her feet. “But you’re lucky,” she said. “There’s a difference between your type of outcast and mine. If you’re a science geek, people give you wedgies and don’t invite you to their parties. But if you’re a witch, everybody just assumes you’re an evil psycho. It’s kind of different.”

“Don’t try and lecture me about my life.” Laurence had gotten to his feet as well, and now he dropped his rucksack on the ground, so it nearly tumbled off the overpass. He felt both sides of his neck tighten up. “Just … don’t. You don’t know what my life is like.”

“Sorry.” Patricia bit her lip, just as a tanker rolled underfoot. “I guess that was out of line. Just trying to warn you that if you’re going to be my friend, you have to be prepared for worse stuff than just people thinking we’re girlfriend-boyfriend. Like, you might get some of my witch cooties on you.”

Laurence rolled his eyes at this. “I think I can handle a little peer pressure.”

BRAD CHOMNER GAVE Laurence a Dumpster swirlie after fifth period a few days later. Laurence looked up, head soaked with slime, rusty walls tearing at his uniform shirt, and Brad was grabbing Laurence by the lapels and hauling him up so they were almost face-to-face. Brad Chomner’s neck was thicker than Laurence’s whole torso. Worse yet, when Brad let Laurence fall to the cement walkway he saw that his indelible forever crush, Dorothy Glass, had been watching the whole thing.

“I don’t know if I can take four more years of this place,” Laurence told Patricia when the two of them were sitting at one end of the lunch table, uncomfortably close to the garbage cans so soon after his trash baptism. His head still itched. “I keep thinking maybe I could transfer to the math-and-science high school in town, instead.”

“I don’t know,” Patricia said. “You’d have to get up early every day and take the bus alone. You’d be spending so much time on the bus, you’d probably miss out on all the after-school stuff.”

“Anything’s better than this,” Laurence said. “Mr. Gluckman, the math teacher, already wrote a letter for me. Now I just have to get my parents to sign the form. I have a feeling they’re going to be weird about me going to school so far away, though.”

“They just want you to have a real childhood. They don’t want you to grow up too fast.”

“They worry about me too much, ever since I ran away from home this one time, to go see a rocket. They just don’t want me to stand out.” While Laurence was talking, a Tater Tot hit him in the head, but he just kept talking as if nothing had happened.

“I think it’s good that you have parents who care what becomes of you.” Patricia seemed to have a soft spot for Laurence’s parents, maybe because they weren’t scary overachievers like hers were.

“My parents are cowards. They’re always terrified someone will notice them and they’ll have to explain themselves.” A second Tater Tot impact. Laurence barely flinched.

Lunch was almost over, and then they had separate classes. Laurence changed the subject. “Hey, do you want to talk to my supercomputer?” He was gathering up all his stuff into his book bag. “I think it needs more interaction with different people, to help it learn how humans think.”

“What would I talk to it about?” Patricia said.

“Just whatever you want,” Laurence said. “Think of it as a friend to confide in.” He pulled a scrap of yellow lined paper out of his bag. “This is the computer’s IM account, on all the main services. Its name is CH@NG3M3.” He spelled that. “It’s a temporary name, just like it sounds. When CH@NG3M3 becomes fully sentient and starts thinking for itself, it can choose a new name. But I like that name. It’s like I’m challenging the computer to grow and change and find an identity for itself.”

“Or maybe you’re asking the computer to change you,” Patricia said.

“Yeah,” Laurence looked at his own handwriting on the notepaper. “Yeah, maybe I am at that.”

“Okay,” Patricia said. “I’ll try talking to it.” She took the paper from Laurence and stuffed it into her skirt pocket.

“Anything you tell CH@NG3M3 will be between you two,” Laurence said. “I won’t ever read any of it.”

“Speaking of which,” Patricia said, “I hear the new guidance counselor is actually pretty okay. Maybe you should go talk to him about your Brad Chomner problem.” The bell rang, and they ran their separate ways.

Laurence decided to take Patricia’s advice, since he’d heard other people say that the new guidance counselor was cool. He’d only recently taken over, after the previous school counselor got run over by a meat truck. The new guy did have an easy, talk-show-host vibe about him as he told Laurence that he could share anything inside this boxy office, with its antidrug posters and bookcases instead of a window. Theodolphus Rose was a tall man with a shaved head — no eyebrows, even — and grotesque, knobby cheekbones and chin.

“I just,” Laurence said. “The bullying. It is interfering. With my ability to achieve academically. When I get locked in a Dumpster, it causes me to miss Social Studies class, which is going to drag my grades down. I am not an escape artist.”

If Laurence didn’t know better, he would think Mr. Rose was studying him. Like a bug. Then the moment passed and Mr. Rose looked friendly and supportive again.

“It seems to me,” the guidance counselor said, “that the other children see you as an easy target, because you’re so noticeable, and yet so defenseless. You have two options in this situation: to make them respect you, or to become invisible. Or some combination of the two.”

“So,” Laurence said, “stop standing out so much? Stop eating lunch in the cafeteria? Build a death ray?”

“I would never advocate violence.” Mr. Rose leaned back in his pleather chair with his hands behind his smooth head. “You children are too important. You are the future, after all. But find ways to make them see what you’re capable of, so they respect you. Keep alert and always know your escape routes. Or try to blend into the shadows as much as possible. They can’t hurt what they can’t see.”

“Okay,” Laurence said. “I sort of see what you’re saying.”

“Children,” said Theodolphus Rose, “are adults who haven’t yet learned to make fear their hand puppet.” He smiled.

7

A BULLFROG JUMPED out of Patricia’s locker. A big one, too large to cup in your hands. It croaked, probably something like “get me out of here.” Its eyes looked strangulated with panic, and its legs — awfully little, to support such a bulbous frame — twitched. It wanted to find its cool wet nest and get away from this white hell. Patricia tried to catch it, but it slipped through her grasp. Someone must have spent hours catching this thing, gotten up at dawn or something. The frog gave a vengeful grunt and took off down the hallway, heading god knew where, as all the kids shrieked with laughter. “Emo bitch,” someone called out.

After school, Patricia sat on her bed and talked to CH@NG3M3, Laurence’s supercomputer, like she did every day lately. “My parents say they’ll never let me go into the woods as long as I live, which means I’m no use to anybody at all. And everybody at school keeps accusing me of being a cutter and a crazy person. Sometimes I wish I was crazy, it would make everything easier.”

“If you were crazy,” CH@NG3M3 responded, “how would you know you were crazy?”

“That’s a good question,” Patricia admitted. “You would need to have one person who you completely trusted. Like, if you trusted one other person, you could check to see if you were seeing the same things they were.” She chewed her thumb, sitting cross-legged on her brass-kettle quilt, legs tucked under her skirt.

“What if you didn’t see the same things?” CH@NG3M3 said. “Would you be crazy?” Sometimes when the computer got out of its depth, it would rephrase Patricia’s answers back to her and change them slightly — which almost looked like it was thinking, but not quite.

“You’re lucky you don’t have eyes, or a body,” Patricia told it. “You don’t have to worry about any of this stuff.”

“What do I have to worry about?” CH@NG3M3 asked, in another blue speech balloon.

“Getting unplugged, I guess. Laurence changing his mind and turning you off.”

“Where would you get another pair of eyes?” CH@NG3M3 abruptly dragged the conversation back to the earlier topic, something that happened when it judged they’d reached a dead end. “What kind of eyes would you want to have?”

Something about this conversation gave Patricia an idea: If her parents wouldn’t let her go back to the woods, maybe she could get them to agree to something else? Like maybe she could get a cat. At dinner, Patricia forked steamed kale around her plate while her mom asked what everybody had done to Improve themselves today. Roberta, the perfect straight-A student, always had the best Improvements, like every day she’d aced some crazy-tough assignment. But Patricia was stuck at a school where all you ever did was memorize stuff and fill out multiple-choice ovals, so she had to lie, or else learn something in her spare time. For three or four days in a row, Patricia kept coming up with Improvements that sounded kind of impressive, storing up credit, and then she started mentioning that she wanted to get a cat.

Patricia’s parents disliked animals and felt certain that they would be allergic. But at last, they relented — so long as Patricia promised to do all cat-related labor, and if the cat got sick they wouldn’t have to rush to a vet or anything. “We have to agree in advance that all veterinary care will be scheduled far ahead, in a time window that’s convenient for Roderick and myself,” said Patricia’s mother. “There will be no such thing as a cat-related emergency. Are we in agreement?”

Patricia nodded and crossed her heart.

Berkley was a fluffy black kitten with a huge white stripe on his stomach and a white smudge across his scowly face. (Patricia named him after a cartoonist.) They got Berkley already fixed, out of a litter of kittens from their neighbor, Mrs. Torkelford, and right away Patricia noticed something familiar about him. He kept giving Patricia the stink-eye and running away from her, and after a few days she realized: He must be the grandson, or grandnephew, of Tommington, the cat she’d stranded up a tree when she was little. Berkley never spoke to her, of course, but she couldn’t shake the impression that he had heard about her.

Also, even though Roberta had expressed no interest in getting a cat beforehand, she wanted to share Berkley. She would hoist Berkley by his little shoulders and carry him up to her bedroom, then close the door. Patricia would hear a pitiful groaning, even over Roberta’s loud music. But the door was locked. And the one time Patricia told her parents she thought Roberta was mistreating the cat, they referred back to the “no cat-related emergencies” clause. All Roberta would say was, “I’m teaching him to play the bongos.”

Patricia wanted to protect Berkley from her sister, but he hissed if Patricia even came close. “Come on,” Patricia kept pleading in her human voice. “You have to let me help you. I don’t want anything from you. I just want to keep you safe.” But the cat fled whenever Patricia approached. He’d taken to hiding in a million nooks and crawl spaces in the spice house, emerging when his bowl was full or he needed the litter box. Roberta had an uncanny ability to know when Berkley was out, and astounding reflexes for scooping him up.

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER Improvement. After lights-out, Patricia heard yowls that started high and got lower and more tragic, coming from Roberta’s room.

The next day, after school, Laurence came over to Patricia’s house, where he’d gotten used to the musty aromas of old seasonings. The two of them sat in the front parlor, where you could still see the outlines on the wall where spice bins had once hung, and worked on a solution to the problem of Berkley.

“If we could capture the cat, we could rig some kind of protective exoskeleton,” Laurence said.

“He’s suffered enough,” Patricia said. “I don’t want to torture him any more by prodding him and attaching some kind of gear to his body.”

“If I knew how to build nanomachines, I would make a swarm of them follow him around and form a shield when he was in distress. But my best attempts at nanomotors were sort of, um, lazy. You wouldn’t like lazy nanobots.”

They caught a glimpse of Berkley in the unilluminable darkness of the spice house’s upper attic, behind a great support beam. A glimmer of fur, a bright pair of eyes. Another time Berkley ran down the stairs, just as they threw themselves in his path. The two children wound up in a bruised heap at the bottom of the stairwell.

“Listen,” Patricia said from the bottom of the stairs. “Tommington was a good cat. I didn’t have anything against him. He was just doing his cat thing. I never meant him any harm, I swear.” There was no response.

“Maybe you should do a spell,” said Laurence. “Do some magic or something. I dunno.”

Patricia felt sure Laurence was laughing at her, but he didn’t have that kind of guile. She would have seen it on his face.

“I’m serious,” Laurence said. “This seems like a magic kind of problem, if there ever was one.”

“But I don’t know how to do anything,” Patricia said. “I mean, the only time I did anything magicky in years was when I ate too much spicy food. I’ve tried every kind of spice a hundred times since then.”

“But maybe you didn’t need to be able to do anything those other times,” Laurence said. “And now, you do.”

Berkley watched them from atop a bookcase full of Patricia’s mother’s Productivity Assessment books. He was ready to flee, fast as a bullet train, if they came too close.

“I wish we could just go into the woods and find that magic Tree,” Patricia said. “But my parents would kill me if they found out. And I know Roberta would tell them.”

“I don’t think we need to go into the woods,” said Laurence, still eager to avoid the outdoors. “From what you told me before, the power is inside you. You just need to get at it.”

Patricia looked at Laurence, who was not in any way screwing with her, and she couldn’t imagine ever having a better friend in the world.

She went back up to the attic, where it was always way hotter than the rest of the spice house, and listened to her own breathing. She looked like a bird to herself, her body so tiny and hollow-boned. Laurence and Berkley were both watching to see what she was going to do. Berkley even crept a little closer along a ceiling beam.

Okay. Now or never.

She imagined that this hot attic was a jungle, and the dry beams were fruitful trees and the boxes of old clothes were lush undergrowth. She couldn’t go to the forest, she couldn’t count on astral-projecting a second time — fine. She would bring the forest to her. She breathed the scents of long-ago chests of saffron and turmeric, and she imagined a million branches splaying over their heads, endless limbs as far as they could see in any direction. She tried to remember the sound of Tommington’s speech, long ago, and tried to speak to Berkley the same way, as close as she could manage.

She had no clue what she was doing, and if she stopped a second to think about what a nut she looked like, she would die.

She was talking under her breath, but she got a little louder. Berkley crept closer, his tongue between two pointy teeth. Patricia swayed a little and reached deep in her throat for a grumbling, raucous sound. Berkley’s ears pricked up.

Berkley was definitely coming over, and Patricia grew louder. He was almost within grabbing distance if she wanted to grab him, which she didn’t.

“You … speak cat?” Berkley said, his eyes ginormous.

“Sometimes.” Patricia couldn’t help laughing with relief. “Sometimes I speak cat.”

“You’re that mean girl,” Berkley said. “You tricked Uncle Tommington.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Patricia said. “I was trying to help a bird.”

“Birds taste good,” Berkley observed, bouncing on his front paws a little. “They flap around and try to fly out of your paws. They are like toys with meat inside.”

“This bird was a friend of mine,” Patricia said.

“A friend?” Berkley struggled with the concept that you could be friends with a bird. What was next, holding conversations with your cat dish?

“Yes. I protect my friends. No matter what. I would like to be your friend.”

Berkley bristled a little bit. “I don’t need any protection. I am a strong fierce cat.”

“Sure, of course. Maybe you can protect me, then.”

“Maybe I can.” Berkley came over and curled up in Patricia’s lap.

“I did it!” She turned to look at Laurence, grinning with her whole face, and realized he was looking kind of … shell-shocked.

Laurence just stared, then shuddered a little.

“Sorry,” Patricia said, “was that weird?” Berkley was purring in her lap. Like a band saw.

“Kind of. Yeah,” Laurence said. His shoulders were a scaffolding around his ears.

“Uh. Good weird, or bad weird?”

“Just … weird. Weirdness is value neutral.… I should go. See you at school.”

Laurence fled, almost as fast as Berkley might have, before Patricia could say anything else. She couldn’t go after him, she finally had a purring cat in her lap. Her familiar. Damn. She’d hoped this wasn’t going to be freaky. What kind of dumbass was she, doing magic like that in front of an outsider? It had been his idea, true, but still.

She started petting Berkley. “We’re just going to protect each other, okay?” He showed no sign that he could still understand her, but whatever. She had finally done a proper spell, on purpose, this time.

8

LAURENCE’S CHEAPJACK LUNCH tray wobbled, sagging under the weight of so much undercooked starch, as he tried to figure out where to sit, as far away from Patricia Delfine as possible. She sat there, in their usual spot, near the compost and trash bins, trying to catch his eye, one brow raised under her messy bangs. The longer he stood, the less stable his tray felt and the more she seemed to squirm in the corner of his eye.

Finally, Laurence took a sharp left and went to sit on the back steps, near where the skaters skateboarded after school, perching the plastic tray on his knees. It was technically against the rules to eat out here, but who cared.

He kept thinking he should try to talk to Patricia, but then he would remember the weirdness. The image of her shimmying around and doing that thing with her hands, and then having a dialogue with her pet in cat noises for an uncomfortable length of time, was enough to make Laurence dry-heave. He pictured the two of them hanging out and Patricia offering to talk to the local wildlife on his behalf, maybe doing her heebie-jeebie dance again.

The whispers Laurence had been hearing about Patricia around the school felt much more relevant, now that he’d seen her in action. Lately he’d been finding any excuse to sit near the graceful, long-limbed Dorothy Glass, and he heard Dorothy and her friends sharing a whole mythos about that girl who kept frogs in her locker. People still thought Laurence was dating Patricia, no matter how he denied it. He couldn’t help remembering Patricia’s warning about “witch cooties.”

“Hey.” Patricia came out the back door and stood right behind him, casting a shadow in his face as he tried to eat his buttery potato wedges. Laurence kept chewing. “Hey,” Patricia said again, angrier this time.

“Hey.” Laurence didn’t turn around.

“What’s going on? Why are you ignoring me? Seriously, please talk to me. This is driving me nuts.” The shadow over Laurence flickered and changed shape, because Patricia was gesturing. “It was your idea. You suggested it. And then I did it, and you freaked out and bailed. Who treats their friends that way?”

“We shouldn’t talk about this at school,” Laurence said very quietly, using his fork as the opposite of a microphone.

“Okay,” Patricia said. “So when do you want to talk about this?”

“I just want to keep my head down,” Laurence said. “Until I can get out of this place. That’s all I want.” An ant stumbled hoisting Laurence’s bread crumb. Maybe Patricia could give it a pep talk in ant language.

“I thought you hated your parents because they just want to keep their heads down.”

Laurence felt a weird combination of shame and rage, as though he’d grown another new body part just in time to get punched in it. He seized his tray and pushed his way past Patricia, not caring if he got potato dregs on himself or on her, and hurried back inside. And of course, someone saw him rushing in the hallway with a half-laden tray and stuck out a leg to trip him up. He ended up face-down in his own muck. It never failed.

Later that day, Brad Chomner tried to cram Laurence’s entire body into a single-file urinal, and then both Brad and Laurence got hauled into Mr. Dibbs’s office for fighting, as if they were equal instigators. Mr. Dibbs called Laurence’s parents to come get him.

“That school is crushing the life out of me,” Laurence told his parents at dinner. “I need to get out of there. I’ve already filled out the application form to transfer to the math-and-science school, and I just need you guys to sign it.” He slid it onto the chipped formica table, where it sat amidst the faded place mats.

“We’re just not sure you’re mature enough to go to school in the city by yourself.” Laurence’s dad carved into his casserole with the edge of his fork, making little snuffling noises with his nose and mouth. “Mr. Dibbs is concerned that you’re a disruptive influence. Just because you get good grades”—snarf, snorf—“doesn’t mean you can be a bad element.”

“You haven’t proved you can handle the responsibility you already have,” said Laurence’s mother. “You can’t make trouble all the time.”

“Your mother and I don’t make trouble,” said Laurence’s father. “We make other things. Because we’re adults.”

“What?” Laurence shoved his casserole away and took a heavy swig of cola instead. “What do you make, exactly? Either of you guys.”

“Don’t talk back,” said Laurence’s father.

“This isn’t about us,” said Laurence’s mother.

“No, I want to know. It occurs to me, I have no clue what either of you produces.” Laurence looked at his dad. “You’re a lower middle manager who denies people’s insurance claims for a living.” He looked at his mom. “You update instruction manuals for obsolete machinery. What do either of you make?”

“We put a roof over your head,” his father said.

“And delicious liver-and-peas casserole on your plate,” his mother said.

“Oh Jesus.” Laurence had never talked to his parents like this before, and he didn’t know what had come over him. “You have no idea how hard I pray not to turn out like you two. My every nightmare, every one, is about turning into a complacent failure like you both. You don’t even remember the dreams you threw away to sink into this hole.” And with that, he pushed his chair hard enough to scar the cheap linoleum and got upstairs before his parents could send him to his room or try to muster some fake outrage. He locked the door.

Laurence wished Isobel and her rocketeer friends would come and take him away. She was helping to run a start-up aerospace company that was actually making deliveries to the Space Station, and he kept reading articles where she was quoted about the brave new future of space travel.

After Laurence flopped onto his bed and gazed up at his ceiling-wide poster in which every fictional spaceship congregated at a massive nebula, he remembered how he’d spoken to his parents. If he strained to listen over the dozen cooling fans along one wall of his bedroom, he could hear his parents fighting. Not the kind of fight where anybody hopes to win. Or even find some solution. This was hopeless, pointless, mindless aggression, two creatures caught in a trap with nothing to do but tear each other apart. Laurence wanted to die.

His mother sounded more wounded, his father more fatalistic. But they had identical levels of bitterness.

Laurence put a pillow over his head. It did no good. He wound up putting his headphones on, with the latest girltrash songs that everybody was listening to at school, and then a pair of winter earmuffs over them. Now he could no longer hear his parents, but he could still imagine what they were saying. He focused on the crooning, growling voice of the girltrash singer, whose name was Heta Neko, and he found himself with an erection. Ignoring it did as much good as ignoring these things ever did. He hated himself, even as he let one hand drift down and carry out the motion he’d practiced incessantly of late. Just as Laurence splashed onto a dirty fast-food napkin, he both heard and felt one of his parents slamming the front door of their house, he didn’t know which.

I wish I were dead and in hell, Laurence thought.

Laurence didn’t sleep much. The next morning, he felt too sick for school, but he knew better than to ask to stay home. He barely noticed when kids threw erasers at him or refused to let him sign their petition to save something or other, because if he signed it then nobody else would.

When Laurence got home that afternoon, he found the form sitting on the kitchen table, signed by both parents. Neither was home. At dinner, he tried to thank them, but they just shrugged and looked at the table. The three of them ate in total silence.

The next day, Laurence just stood in the hallway, watching it drain of people. He realized his buttons were buttoned wrong, so his jacket was askew.

Patricia came up to him in the hallway. “You’re going to be late,” she said. “They’re going to kill you.”

For the first time ever, Laurence noticed that Patricia was pretty. Her skin had a brightness underlying its faint tan. Like an airbrushed picture he’d seen once. Her neck was really smooth and graceful, and her wrist pivoted as she held her backpack on her shoulder. Her dark hair fell almost over one gray-green eye. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders. He wanted to run away from her. He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to scream.

Instead, he said, “Do you want to ditch school?”

“Why?” she said. “And go where?”

“Let’s go to the woods,” he said. “I want to see your magic Tree.”

He no longer cared if this girl was crazy. He was a bad person, and what was worse, being crazy or being evil? Plus she might be the only girl who would even consider kissing him before he turned thirty. And he was growing more conscious that he had been a dick to her.

“You want to go to the woods with me,” Patricia said. “Right now.”

Laurence nodded. He needed to fidget. He didn’t.

He thought about how dull the tiles underfoot were. Someone waxed them every day, leaving them shiny for an hour until they dried and hundreds of kids walked on them, and then the floor just looked sticky and gray with wax scum. The floor probably looked dirtier than if nobody ever waxed it.

“I’m sorry,” Patricia said. “I can’t. I have to stay on at this school, after you’ve gone on to your math paradise.”

“Sure,” Laurence said. “Okay.” He wanted to say something else, like maybe apologize, but he didn’t. And then the moment had evaporated, and they were walking to separate classes.

WHEN THEODOLPHUS ROSE was fourteen, he’d slept on a bunk of mossy slate. He had mastered a hundred ways to kill a woman without awakening the man sleeping next to her. Every morning, an hour before dawn, the fourteen-year-old Theodolphus had gone for a ten-mile run with a ceramic urn full of his teacher’s urine on his head, and if a single drop spilled or he failed to complete the ten miles within an hour and a half, he would be forced to stand on his head until he saw a river of sunfire. His only meals had been the not-quite-lethal mushrooms and berries he’d been taught to pick in the thickets near the cliff-sheltered school fortress. And yet the Nameless Assassin School was a country club compared to Canterbury Academy. For one thing, he had been learning things, skills that he still used in his vocation, and he had taken pride in them. For another, nobody had forced him to answer multiple-choice questions on battered notebook computers. If they had given standardized tests in assassin school, he would not have lasted a day. (Theodolphus made a mental note to hunt down Lars Saarinian, the psychologist who had studied the slaughterhouse behavior of pigs and come up with an educational regimen for human children, when he finally got out of here.)

Theodolphus had spent weeks spying on these two children, listening to all of their conversations, at home and at school. He’d parked across the street from their houses and eavesdropped on the two of them, together and separately. He’d racked his brains trying to come up with a death that didn’t require his hands-on involvement — thus complying with the letter of the child-murder ban — but would still tell a good story. Something artistic. He had this notion that the children would go into the woods together, where Laurence could be bitten by a snake and then Patricia could try sucking the poison out of him and accidentally poison herself. But no, because Patricia was forbidden to go into the woods and she was the only child on earth who obeyed her parents. Theodolphus kept hoping Patricia would have a moment of rebelliousness, and being brutalized by disappointment.

By now, after weeks of slouching on purpose in his office chair, listening to Brad Chomner talk about his body-image issues, Theodolphus just wanted this over with. This was the longest he’d gone without killing someone in years, and his hands kept getting ideas. He sat in faculty meetings and imagined just how much of Don Gluckman’s insides he could show the math teacher while keeping him alive.

Worst of all was when Theodolphus had to give advice about puberty, something he had never personally experienced.

Lucy Dodd got a stomach flu — not Theodolphus’s work — and they needed someone to teach English for a few days. Theodolphus volunteered. It would give him another chance to study his prey, since both Laurence and Patricia took that class.

All of the kids had clearly been looking forward to having a sub so they could goof off. When they saw it was Theodolphus, wearing a crisp black shirt, matching black pants, and a red tie, they all sighed with disappointment — for some reason, Theodolphus had become the most popular faculty member at this school, and nobody felt like screwing with him. “Most of you know me,” he said, making eye contact with each surly dough face in turn.

Laurence and Patricia sat at separate tables, not talking to each other, not even looking at each other, except that the girl kept giving the boy wounded little glances. The boy glared at his secondhand Scarlet Letter.

Traci Burt read out a passage she’d memorized, with perfect diction and a smile full of ceramic braces. Then Theodolphus attempted to get a discussion going about Hester Prynne and whether she was unfairly treated, and got back a lot of canned answers about Puritan morality, and then he called on Laurence. “Mr. Armstead. Do you think society needs to burn the occasional witch for the sake of social cohesion?”

“What?” Laurence jumped, so that three legs of his chair left the ground. He dropped all his books on the floor. Everybody else laughed and texted. “I’m sorry,” Laurence babbled, gathering up all his stuff. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Oh yes, Theodolphus said to himself. You know perfectly well.

“I see.” Theodolphus made a scritch on a paper, as if writing the boy off. “How about you, Miss Delfine? Do you think the occasional witch burning helps to weld society together?”

Patricia lost a breath. Then she found it again and looked up, regarding Theodolphus with a steadiness that he couldn’t help admiring. Her thin lips pushed out.

“Well,” Patricia said. “A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn’t know it yet.”

With that, Theodolphus knew how he would finish this mission, and redeem his professional self-respect once and for all.

9

THE SNOWSTORM HIT a few weeks after Laurence more or less stopped talking to Patricia. She woke up with Berkley curled between her bent elbow and her shoulder, and looked out her window without getting all the way out of bed. The ground and the sky mirrored each other: two sheets of white.

Patricia shuddered and almost pulled the covers over her head. Instead, she took the hottest shower she could bear and put on her long johns for the first time this year. They no longer fit.

Patricia’s mother was already on-site and her father was multi-focusing with his laptop and a stack of folders, so at least Patricia didn’t have to talk to her parents. But Roberta came down halfway through breakfast and just stared at Patricia without talking, and that was creepy, and at last Roberta went off to Ellenburg High and Patricia was left hoping against hope that Canterbury Academy was having a snow day.

No such luck. Patricia got to school in her dad’s sedan, and almost broke her neck on the slushy steps. People threw snowballs with gravel in them at Patricia’s head, but she didn’t bother to turn and look — that would just be presenting a better target.

“Miss Delfine,” a smooth, deep voice said behind Patricia in the near-empty hallway. (A lot of kids had stayed home after all.) Patricia turned to see Mr. Rose, the guidance counselor with the knuckle face, looming in a pin-striped slate suit.

“Umm. Yes?”

Mr. Rose had never made much of an impression, though everybody said he was the only decent authority figure at this cruddy school. But today he seemed dark and towering, a foot taller than normal. Patricia shrugged this off as just snow-day nerves.

“I was hoping to discuss something with you,” Mr. Rose said in a deeper than usual voice. “Perhaps you could come by my office when you get a moment. I find that I have an unusually free schedule today.”

Patricia said “Sure,” and dashed off to first period. The school was half-empty, and the snow kept blinding her through the windows. It all felt like a weird dream. Her first class was Math, and Mr. Gluckman wasn’t even trying to teach — everybody just goofed off.

Her second period teacher hadn’t even made it to school, so it became a free period, after ten minutes of perfunctory waiting. Patricia drifted toward Mr. Rose’s office.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice. I will keep this brief.” Mr. Rose’s teeth clacked inside his dry white lips. This wasn’t the Mr. Rose Patricia was used to. He sat straighter in his gray chair, hands folded on his walnut desk, with its cartoon walrus pencil holder. Behind him, there was a wall of books on child development.

Patricia nodded. Mr. Rose took a deep breath.

“I have a message for you,” he said, “from the Tree.”

“The what—?” Patricia felt sure this was a dream. The pale world, the empty school — she was still in bed with Berkley.

“Well, not the Tree exactly. But the power the Tree represents. I know you’ve waited a long time to fulfill your purpose as a witch. You’ve been more than patient. So I have been tasked with informing you that your wait is almost over. The secrets will soon be yours.”

Patricia couldn’t breathe. Her hands were gripping her chair arms. She felt hot around her face and yet freezing in her extremities. Her blood was all going to her head, as if it were preparing to separate from her body. Her feet kicked each other.

“What?” she said at last. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Umm…” She was on the verge of babbling, but reined it in. This was important witch business. “Um. Who are you?” She would not have disbelieved, necessarily, if he’d claimed to be Merlin or something.

“I’m your school guidance counselor.” Mr. Rose smiled with one lip. “I’m just passing along a message, that’s all. This is the only time you and I will ever discuss this matter.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“You will be receiving instructions soon. In the meantime, there is one task you must perform.”

“Umm…” Stop saying umm, Patricia told herself. “Umm, is it like a test? Or an assignment? Do I have to prove myself worthy?”

“You have already proved everything you needed to prove. No, this is merely a task. But an unpleasant one. There is a boy at this school who will grow up to be a great enemy of nature, and a persecutor of the magical community. You already know him. His name is Laurence Armstead. He may have asked to see a demonstration of magic recently. He may even have asked you to show him the Tree. Is this so?”

“Umm … yeah.” This conversation was like falling off the edge of the world, plummeting all the way around the globe, and then falling off the edge a second time. Patricia’s stomach was upside down.

“So you already know. I hate to say this, and remember I’m just the messenger. I regard all human life as precious and irreplaceable. But Laurence Armstead must die. And you must be the one to kill him. Nobody else can do it. As soon as you complete this task, you can begin your training.”

Patricia couldn’t remember what she said after that — it probably had a lot of “umm” in it. She didn’t say she would kill Laurence, and she didn’t say she wouldn’t. She may have thanked Mr. Rose for the message. She wasn’t sure. She was in an upright coma for the rest of the day. Even Roberta hanging from the banister upside down and staring at her after dinner barely registered. Roberta’s dark brown hair hung straight down and her eyebrows twitched, but she said nothing as Patricia walked past.

Patricia found herself in Roberta’s room an hour later, right before lights-out. “Bert,” she said, using her old nickname. “Could you kill a person? If you absolutely had to?”

Roberta was painting her toenails candy-apple green, in her white cotton PJs. “Wow, Trish. Morbid much?” She laughed. “For your information, the answer is yes and no. Yes, I would be willing, if I felt it was necessary and whatever. But I probably couldn’t go through with it. I would be too much of a wuss to look at someone and take them out. Even if I was sure it was the right thing.”

“Umm, okay. Thanks.”

“But Trish,” Roberta called after Patricia as she turned to go to her own room, across the hallway. “If you do ever take someone out, I get to watch. I want to see you do it.”

“Umm, okay.”

Laurence was back at school the next day, in a good mood for a change, swinging his arms in the wet hallways like he owned the place. He was back to not talking to Patricia, but he smiled at her without looking right at her. She could so easily end him, just push him in front of one of the senior citizen tour buses the school used as transportation. It would look like an accident. Patricia found herself studying his twitchy head and slender wrists, trying to imagine if it could be true: Was he going to become an enemy of magic? He was already hostile to it, that was for sure. Maybe the grown-up Laurence would be some kind of monster, for all she knew, persecuting her kind. Maybe this was part of what witches did — regretfully, sorrowfully — snuffing out people who would threaten the balance of nature?

She watched him in the cafeteria. Punishing his food. She watched him running wind sprints up and down the hill behind the school, shivering in his track uniform. She tried to imagine him launching a vendetta. Persecuting her friends, if she ever actually had friends. She couldn’t make herself believe it, and she couldn’t do it unless she did. She could imagine killing him, that was shockingly easy — one shove, into the big wheels — but she couldn’t imagine him deserving it.

Whenever she tried to talk to Mr. Rose, he was either busy or absent. She finally caught up with him in the hallway near the teacher lounge and tried to mention the Tree. He looked at her as if she was speaking gibberish. One brow raised.

At home, she asked CH@NG3M3, “Will Laurence become an enemy of magic?”

CH@NG3M3 responded, “Do you think Laurence will become an enemy of magic?”

“I’m asking you.”

“Why are you asking me?”

She couldn’t get to sleep for ages, even with Berkley scrunched along her rib cage — but then she finally slept, and dreamed she was carving Laurence open with a big knife. His skin parted to reveal a shining portal to a magical land full of kind wizards who gave her a wand of her own. She dreamed she lured him to the Wadlow River cliff, where the high-school kids partied, and shoved him off the edge onto the sharp, slippery rocks.

She woke up crying and shaking and holding on to Berkley for dear life.

SOMEONE THREW A rock at Patricia’s head before school started. Not a snowball with rocks in it, just a plain chunk of granite. Patricia ducked, but slipped on the path. Laurence grabbed her arm and helped her to her feet. He steadied her, and seemed to be trying to say something. Then he walked away, like he usually did these days whenever he was about to speak to her.

First period, Patricia reached in her backback for her textbook and something else spilled out: a pair of panties, with a stain she couldn’t identify and didn’t care to examine further. She was sure they hadn’t been there when she left the house. The other kids at her table, including Macy Firestone, started laughing and taking photos.

“What’s that commotion?” Mr. Gluckman asked from the board.

“Someone has put … something unspeakable in my bag.” Patricia tried to sound dignified, not like a victim but not like a troublemaker, either.

“Emo bitch,” someone hissed from the corner.

“That’s no excuse for disrupting my class.” Mr. Gluckman frowned, between gray sideburns. “You are taking time away from all of the children who are here to learn something.”

“I didn’t do anything!” Patricia said. “Somebody else—”

“If ‘someone’ has been storing inappropriate items in ‘someone’s’ bag, I suggest you take it up with the principal or Mr. Dibbs.”

Patricia looked around. A roomful of pure entertainment. She caught Laurence’s eye and he gave her a blank, helpless look.

“Fine,” Patricia stood up. “I will. May I be excused?” She didn’t wait for an answer. The door crashed shut behind her, failing to block out the cheers and applause.

She made it halfway to Mr. Dibbs’s office before Mr. Dibbs charged around a corner and grabbed her arm. “You”—he grabbed her arm with one meaty hand—“have some explaining to do.” She tried talking to him, but he hauled her right into the girls’ room, where she saw, written in blood on the wall:

It wasn’t human blood. It wasn’t fresh blood. It was definitely blood, though — whoever had done this had left plastic containers from the butcher shop in the trash. The “paint” was dripping, the message still melting on the wall. Someone had gone into the girls’ room and painted this right after first period began, without anybody noticing. You would have to be a ninja.

“What…” Patricia felt frostbitten from the inside out. The stench was punishing: a noxious slaughterhouse odor, the dying distress of cattle immortalized in smell form. She couldn’t bear to be in the same room with it.

Mr. Dibbs’s jaw twitched under his dark, thick beard. He gestured at the wall with his free hand. “You are going to clean this up and then we are going to call your parents to come and have a conversation about civilized behavior and barbarism and the vital! The crucial! Difference between the two.”

“I didn’t … Please let go of my arm, you’re hurting me.” She couldn’t hear herself talk. He jerked her closer to the wall, so she was inches away from it. “I don’t know anything about this. Please let go of my arm, corporal punishment is illegal in school and you are hurting me, please LET GO OF MY ARM!”

Mr. Dibbs let go of her, but he was already turning to go call Patricia’s parents. They wouldn’t listen to her either. There would be three adults screaming at her, instead of one.

“Listen,” Patricia said. “Whoever did this, they did it during first period. Lots of girls went to the bathroom before first period and there was no blood on the wall then. And everybody saw me in first period, I was the first to arrive at Math class. There’s no way I could have done this. So excuse me, sir, I am going back to Math class now.”

Her “victory” left Patricia with soiled panties still to dispose of and a classroom full of kids who kept trying to take photos of her to post on Instagram with mean comments.

The blood graffiti stayed on the bathroom wall the rest of the day. The school janitor refused to go near it on religious grounds — nobody knew what religion he was, exactly, and he wouldn’t say.

Patricia kept feeling as though she was going to blow chunks, as she sat in classroom after classroom listening to the other kids whispering and the teachers trying to carry on as if nothing had happened. She couldn’t throw up if she were willing to, because the whole school had just a dozen toilet stalls for girls now and the lines were forever. She did wait in line once to pee, and girls kept shoving her “by accident.”

Patricia tried to talk to Laurence once or twice, but he kept slipping away.

As she reached the doorway, she noticed Mr. Rose studying her from inside the school. He’d gone back to normal size. She remembered what she’d been trying not to think about: He’d told her she’d be going away soon from this terrible place. Her training would begin. She would be free and luminous, a real witch. She only had to complete. One small task.

10

LAURENCE LOST TRACK of how many conversations he overheard about the scandal of Patricia. People had nothing else to talk about as they suited up for Track and Field (Laurence was Field, sort of), or studied for the big exams, or waited for gymnastics tryouts, which Laurence was “keeping Dorothy Glass company” for. (She hadn’t yet told him to go away and seemed to appreciate him bringing her stuff.) Dorothy did this thing with her leg as she perched on the bleachers that felt personally significant to Laurence.

Laurence had a line he wouldn’t cross: He would never say anything bad about Patricia or laugh at anyone else’s burn. He wouldn’t sycophant his way into the outskirts of anyone’s group by burning his onetime friend. Mostly, he tried not to think about the Patricia thing. She could look after herself. He was in a cocoon, pupating and incommunicado. There was nothing he could do either way. Six months from now, if everything went to plan, Laurence would be a freshman at the math-and-science school.

And in the meantime, Laurence poured every spare minute into upgrading CH@NG3M3, which claimed more and more space in his secure closet, until he had to throw out most of his clothes. Every time he added more processing power, the computer seemed to chew it up right away. Laurence had built a neural network with just a handful of layers, but somehow this had grown on its own to over twenty layers, as CH@NG3M3 kept refactoring itself. Not only that, but the serial connections had gotten more confusing — instead of sending data from Machine A to Machine B to Machine C, it was going from A to B to C to B to C to A, creating more and more feedback loops.

One day, Patricia was in line next to Laurence at the cafeteria. She looked messed up — dark hair falling into her face, circles under her eyes, uniform disarrayed, socks mismatched — and she wasn’t looking at anything in particular. She didn’t even notice what sort of crap they slung onto her tray. Someone who doesn’t care if they get Tater Tots or turnip slurry is a person who has given up on life.

Laurence had a powerful conviction he should say something to Patricia. Nobody would notice. He wouldn’t stand up and shout that he was on her side or anything.

“Hey,” Laurence muttered in Patricia’s general direction. She didn’t seem to hear him. She stumbled, zombie-like, toward the desserts.

“Hey,” Laurence said, a little louder. “Hey Patricia. How are you, like, doing?”

“I’m doing,” Patricia said without looking up.

“Cool, cool,” Laurence said, as if she’d ended that sentence with an adverb. “Me too, me too.”

They went their separate ways — they were both eating alone, but Laurence had the privilege of eating alone in a secluded nook of the cafeteria, behind the milk pumps with their sawn-off rubber tubing. Patricia, meanwhile, ate alone in a dim corner of the library, behind the geography shelves, where Laurence barely noticed her when he dropped off a book on his way to class. She was so shrouded, she looked like Batman.

At home, Laurence studied his parents, who had forgotten that he’d yelled at them for being defeated by life a few weeks earlier. Laurence’s dad kept complaining about his car sound system eating his CDs.

There was an article online about problems with the aerospace company that Isobel, the rocket scientist, was helping to run. Launches getting canceled over and over, minor accidents. He read it three times, cursing each time.

Laurence got a letter saying he’d been admitted to the math-and-science high school for the fall. He kept it on his dresser, next to his grandmother’s old ring and his three different combs (for different parts of his head) and he looked at it every morning as he got dressed for school. The two crinkly folds in the paper started to look like the lines of Laurence’s palm after a while. Life lines.

One night, Laurence was already in his PJs, but he wound up on his hands and knees in front of his closet, staring at the skein of crossover cables running between all the jury-rigged parts of CH@NG3M3. The instructions had gotten much more numerous and complicated than Laurence could possibly understand, covering eventualities that he couldn’t envision. And CH@NG3M3 had thousands of accounts on free services all over the world, where it was storing data or pieces of itself in the cloud.

And then Laurence noticed something: Every time Patricia had one of her conversations with CH@NG3M3, the computer’s code base took another exponential leap into greater complexity right afterward. Maybe just a random correlation. But Laurence kept staring at the dates and times of the logs and thinking about Patricia breathing life into his machine, while he was blowing her off.

Laurence found Patricia on the front steps the next morning. She stared at the school, maybe trying to decide if she should even bother. “Hey,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that I got your back. I don’t think you’re a Satanist.”

Patricia shrugged. Her dark hair had grown longer, so it almost ran into her jumper. “Why would anybody be a Satanist, anyway? I don’t get it. You can’t believe in Satan without believing in God, and then you’re just picking the wrong side in a big mythic battle thing.”

Everybody else had gone inside. They were ringing the second bell. “I guess if you’re a Satanist, you believe that God is the bad guy, and He rewrote history to make Himself look good.”

“But if that’s true,” Patricia said, “then you’re just worshiping a guy who needs to get a better PR team.”

Laurence and Patricia sat together at lunch — in the library, but not in the dark corner, because there wasn’t enough space for two people in there. Laurence tried to ask Patricia about how she was dealing, and she just shut down, like the whole topic of conversation put her in a coma.

“Maybe,” Laurence said, “maybe you should talk to Mr. Rose.”

“What?” Patricia snapped out of her daze, her eyes wide open.

“Mr. Rose, the guidance counselor. You said you thought he was cool.”

“I can’t talk to Mr. Rose,” Patricia said under her breath, barely audible even in the quiet library. “He’s … I think there’s something not right about him. He told me to … he said something seriously crazy to me, just a couple days before the bloody wall happened. And I keep thinking there has to be some connection there.”

Laurence had to lean so close to hear what she was saying, he nearly took her nose out with his chin.

“What did he say?” Laurence whispered.

Patricia thought for a moment, then shook her head. “I can’t even repeat it. If I told you what he said, you would think I was making it up.”

“I would believe you, over Mr. Rose,” Laurence said, and meant it.

“Not about this,” Patricia said. “Imagine if you said something to someone that was so crazy, nobody would ever believe you had said it. This was worse.”

This was driving Laurence round the bend. “Just tell me,” he said. “It can’t be that bad.” But the more he pushed, the more she clammed up, until she had gone back to coma mode. Whatever Mr. Rose had said to her, it had messed her up more than a ton of kids accusing her of being a cutter and blood painter. They ended up sitting in silence until Lunch Recess was over, and then they had to hustle their trays back to the cafeteria.

“Let’s go to the mall after school,” Laurence said as they dumped their trays. “We can tell your parents you’re at my house, and my parents that we’re doing something outdoorsy. It’ll be like old times.”

“Sure.” Patricia shivered. “I could use some hot chocolate. With like a million marshmallows.”

“Let’s make it happen.”

They shook on it. Laurence felt like he’d removed a splinter that he’d forgotten was even jabbing into his skin. He walked to Science class alone. Brad Chomner lunged out and grabbed the collar of Laurence’s uniform jacket and lifted him with one hand, so Laurence’s armpits scraped.

“You should have left the emo bitch alone,” Brad Chomner said. He swung Laurence like a shot put and let go.

11

SNOW TURNED EVERYTHING gray, as far as Patricia could see. Even the forbidden woods near the spice house looked washed out, with their dark tree shapes covered with three storms’ worth of snowfall. Patricia never left the house now, except to go to school, so the cold came to seem much worse than it was. Mythic, in its ability to freeze the life out of you the moment you left your front door. Patricia sat in bed, talking to CH@NG3M3 or reading the stack of paperbacks she’d gotten from the big library sale. She curled up with Berkley in just a corner of her bed, making a warm space with her comforter and spare blanket. Berkley hadn’t gone near Roberta in months, and protecting this cat might be the one achievement of Patricia’s life.

Patricia had started flunking most of her classes, though she was still trying her best. She’d never had to hide report cards from her parents before.

Since the Wall of Blood thing, there had been a couple other incidents, including an obscene Barbie tableau in the girls’ locker room and a stink bomb in a big garbage can. Nobody could prove Patricia was responsible, but nobody doubted it. When Laurence had talked to Patricia in public, he’d gotten the crap kicked out of him.

Her craziest days, Patricia sat in class and wondered if maybe Mr. Rose had been telling the truth. Maybe she was supposed to kill Laurence. Maybe it was him or her. Whenever she thought about killing herself, like with a ton of her mom’s sleeping pills or something, some survivalist part of herself substituted an image of killing Laurence instead.

And then just the thought of killing the closest thing she had to a friend made Patricia almost throw up. She wasn’t going to kill herself. She wasn’t going to kill anybody else.

Probably she was just going insane. She’d imagined all this witchy crap, and she really was the one leaving messed-up shit all over the school. It would not surprise her if her family had managed to drive her nuts.

Pretty much every conversation between Patricia and CH@NG3M3 began the same way. Patricia wrote: “God I’m so lonely.” To which the computer always replied: “Why are you lonely?” And Patricia would try to explain.

“I THINK CH@NG3M3 likes you,” Laurence told Patricia as they slipped out the back of the school, handling the big metal door softly as a baby, so as to make no sound on their way out.

“It’s good to have someone to talk to,” Patricia said. “I think CH@NG3M3 needs someone to talk to as well.”

“In theory, the computer can talk to anyone, or any computer, all over the world.”

“Probably some types of input are better than others,” said Patricia.

“Sustained input.”

“Yeah. Sustained.”

Snow crisped every inch of the world, making every footstep a slow descent. Laurence and Patricia held hands. For balance. The landscape shone like a dull mirror.

“Where are we going?” Patricia asked. The school was somewhere behind them. They were going to have to turn back soon if they were to have any hope of making it to the ceremony, at which the five top-scoring seniors were going to recite memorized passages and talk about what the Saarinian Program meant to them.

“I don’t know,” Laurence said. “I think there’s like a lake back here. I want to see if it’s frozen over. Sometimes, if a lake is frozen the right kind of solid, you can throw rocks at the ice and it makes a natural ray-gun sound effect. Like pew-pew-pew.”

“That’s cool,” Patricia said.

She still wasn’t sure where she stood with Laurence. They’d hung out, furtively, a few times since their lunch in the library. But Patricia felt like both she and Laurence knew, in the deepest crevices of their hearts, that they would each ditch the other in a second, if they had a chance to belong, really belong, with a group of others like themselves.

“I’m never going to get away from here.” Patricia was knee-deep in snow. “You’ll go off to your S&M high school, and I’m going to stay and lose my mind. I’m going to be so socially destroyed, I’m going to turn radioactive.”

“Well,” said Laurence. “I don’t know that it’s possible to ‘turn radioactive,’ unless you’re exposed to certain isotopes, and in that case you probably wouldn’t survive.”

“I wish I could sleep for five years and wake up as a grown-up.” Patricia kicked the frozen dirt. “Except I would know all the stuff you’re supposed to learn in high school, by sleep-learning.”

“I wish I could turn invisible. Or maybe become a shape-shifter,” Laurence said. “Life would be pretty cool if I was a shape-shifter. Unless I forgot what I was supposed to look like, and could never get back to my original shape, ever. That would suck.”

“What if you could just change how other people saw you? So like if you wanted, they would see you as a hundred-foot-tall rabbit. With the head of an alligator.”

“But you’d be physically the same? You’d just look different to other people?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“That would royally suck. Eventually someone touches you, and then they know the truth. And then, nobody would ever take your illusions seriously again. There’s no point, unless you can physically change.”

“I don’t know,” Patricia said. “It depends what you’re trying to do. Plus, what if you could make people see or hear whatever you wanted, and just mess with people’s perceptions in general? That would be cool, right?”

“Yes.” Laurence pondered for a moment. “That would be cool.”

They came to a river that neither of them remembered having seen before. It was covered with a white layer, and the jutting rocks looked like the fake sapphires in the necklace that Roberta had gotten Patricia for Christmas. The river current kept the water from freezing, except for a layer of frost.

“Where the hell did this come from?” Laurence poked at the brook with his foot and broke a tiny piece of its shell.

“I think it’s really shallow and you can just step across it most of the time,” Patricia said. “The rocks are easy to walk on, except when it’s all icy like this.”

“Well, this sucks.” Laurence squatted down to examine the river, nearly soaking his butt on the slushy ground. “What’s the point of ditching school if we can’t go make laser noises on the ice?”

“We should head back,” Patricia said.

They headed back. This time they didn’t hold hands, as if getting stymied on their expedition had left them divided. Patricia skidded and fell on one knee, tearing her tights and scraping off some skin. Laurence reached down to help her up, but she shook her head and got up on her own.

This was a metaphor for how it was with Laurence, Patricia realized. He would be supportive and friendly as long as something seemed like a grand adventure. But the moment you got stuck or things were weirder than expected, he would pull away. You could never predict which Laurence you would get.

You could not count on Laurence, Patricia told herself. You just couldn’t, and you should just get used to that idea. She felt as though she had settled something, once and for all.

“I think being able to control other people’s senses would trump everything, even shape-shifting,” Laurence said out of nowhere. “Because who cares what your physical form looks like, as long as you can control how everybody perceives you? You could be all deformed and messed up, and it wouldn’t matter. The key is controlling the tactile as well as the visual.”

“Yeah.” Patricia picked up the pace and tromped back to the back parking lot, so Laurence had to rush to catch up. “But you’d know what you really were. And that’s all that matters.”

When they got back through the parking lot’s gravel slush pit, they found the back door to the school was jammed shut. Locked? Frozen stuck? Patricia and Laurence both tore at the door, since the front entrance was all the way around the building and they would get busted for 100 percent certain. Laurence put one foot on the white-stone wall and pulled with all his Track-and-Field-but-mostly-Field might. Patricia pulled at the edges of the sharp metal handle, which was shaped like a shelf bracket. They both tugged as hard as they could, and then the door swung open. Someone was laughing on the inside of the door. Laurence and Patricia caught a glimpse of not-quite-uniform sneakers and a trio of pudgy hands, before she and Laurence both fell on their asses. Whoever had been holding the door shut from the inside laughed louder, as Laurence and Patricia tried to pick themselves up, and then a blue shape came arcing toward them, and Patricia barely had time to recognize a plastic bucket before a white arm of water sloshed out and they were both soaked. Someone was taking photos.

12

THEODOLPHUS HAD NOT eaten ice cream since the poisoning at the mall, and he didn’t deserve any now. Ice cream was for assassins who finished their targets. Still, he kept imagining how ice cream would taste, how it would melt on his tongue and release layers of flavor. He no longer trusted ice cream, but he needed ice cream.

Well. So be it. Theodolphus went and got in his Nissan Stanza, deflecting his landlady’s usual attempts at flirtation with a wave. He drove for hours, crossing and recrossing state lines, circling and swerving and doubling back, using every trick he could think of. Then he came to a convenience store two states away, where he bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, one of the flavors named after a celebrity. He ate it in the driver’s seat with a spork from his glove compartment.

“I don’t deserve this ice cream,” he kept repeating with each bite until he started crying. “I don’t deserve this ice cream.” He sobbed.

A few days later, Theodolphus looked across his desk at an angry blonde girl, Carrie Danning, and realized he had been working as a school guidance counselor for nearly six months, or a dozen times longer than he had ever held a regular job before. This was the first time Theodolphus had ever owned more than two pairs of socks.

The most horrifying thing was, Theodolphus sort of cared about these children and their ludicrous problems. Maybe just because he’d invested so much time, he wanted to see how it all came out. He worried about school politics. He had a gnawing sense that all the debates over whether to allow kids to advance even if they had failed some part of the testing regime were somehow meaningful. He had vivid nightmares about sitting in on parent-teacher conferences.

Carrie Danning was saying that she was over trying to be friends with Macy Firestone, who was a toxic individual, and Theodolphus was nodding without quite listening.

Here’s how it worked if you were a member of the Nameless Order, like Theodolphus — you didn’t see your fellow members that much outside of the five-year gatherings, but you got bulletins in the patterns of dead grass around you, or human bones in one of your shoes — these would let you know if someone had ascended in the rankings, or had made a spectacular brace of kills lately. By now, all of his fellows would be getting little legless creatures in their hats or car glove compartments, signifying that Theodolphus had been having the dry spell to end all dry spells — including whoever had poisoned Theodolphus’s sundae and warned him against directly harming the two children.

Something smooth and red was inside the half-open drawer of Theodolphus’s desk. For a moment he was certain it was a strip of blood-soaked silk from the Order, signifying his fall in status. But instead, he pulled out a cream-colored envelope, lined in red, around a card that informed Theodolphus the District had nominated him for Educator of the Year. He was invited to an award ceremony, at which black tie would be worn and factory-farmed creatures would be eaten. Theodolphus almost wept in front of Carrie Danning. He had to end this somehow. Whatever it took, he had to get his life back.

13

LAURENCE SAW HIS parents coming out of Mr. Rose’s office in the middle of the day. They looked alarmed — literally, as if an alarm had gone off next to their heads and their ears were still ringing. They wouldn’t look at him or acknowledge him at all, as they hustled out of the school and into their car.

Laurence barged into Mr. Rose’s office without knocking. “What did you say to my parents just now?”

“That’s covered by the same confidentiality that all of our conversations in this room enjoy.” Mr. Rose smiled and leaned back in his big chair.

“You’re not a therapist,” said Laurence. “And you shouldn’t pretend to be.”

“Your parents are worried about you,” said Mr. Rose. “You’re one of the most gifted and intelligent students we’ve ever had at this school.”

“What did you say to my parents?” Laurence said. “And what did you say to Patricia, before that? She still won’t tell me what it was, but it messed her up.”

“This is nothing to do with Patricia,” said Mr. Rose. “We’re talking about you.”

“No. We’re talking about you.” Laurence was thinking about how Patricia looked like she’d seen a ghost whenever he mentioned Mr. Rose, and the way Mr. Rose had studied him like an insect before. Things were falling into place. “You said something to freak out my parents, just like you freaked out Patricia before. What did you say?”

“As I was saying, your test scores are off the charts. But your attitude? Threatens to ruin everything.”

“I guess I’m lucky that you already promised that everything I say in here is a secret,” Laurence said. “I can go ahead and tell you that you’re a fake. You’re not the coolest adult at this school, you’re some kind of troll, hiding out in your crappy little pasteboard office and messing with people. My parents are weak-minded and feeble, life has crushed their spirits, and so you think they’re easy marks. But I’m here to tell you that they’re not, and Patricia isn’t, either. I’m going to see that you burn.”

“I see.” Mr. Rose’s hands were twitching. “In that case, what comes next is your own doing. Good day, Mr. Armstead.”

Laurence’s parents weren’t around when he got home, and he was left to scavenge frozen pizza. Around 10:00 PM, he came downstairs and caught his parents looking at brochures, which they hid as soon as they heard his footsteps.

“What were you just looking at?” Laurence asked.

“Just some…,” said his father.

“Just some materials,” said his mother.

The next day, they hauled him out of bed just after dawn and told him he wasn’t going to school today. Instead, they stuck him in the back of their hatchback, and his father drove as if he had a heat-seeking missile on his tail.

“Where are we driving to?” Laurence asked his parents, but they just stared at the road.

They sank into grayest Connecticut, with the interstate hemmed in with rock walls, until they turned onto a series of backwoods humps made of tarmac, then dirt, then gravel. The birch trees jittered and whispered, as if they were trying to tell Laurence something, and then he saw the sign: “COLDWATER: A Military Reform School. Now Reopened Under New Management.” They parked in a rock pile, surrounded by battered Jeeps, and on their left jumped a phalanx of twenty or thirty teenage boys, any one of whom could wipe the floor with Brad Chomner.

And beyond those kids doing jumping jacks, a big American flag hung half-mast.

“You,” Laurence told his parents, “have got to be kidding.”

They mumbled that he had left them no choice, with his disruptive behavior, and he was just going to try out this school for a few days to see if Coldwater could be an option for him for high school — instead of that science school, where he would only learn more ways to be destructive.

What the hell had Mr. Rose told them, that he was building a bomb?

Laurence’s brain was as hot and oxygen poor as the inside of this car. He felt an acute pain, like the skin of his life breaking as his future was ripped away. His parents were already walking up the dirt path to the cement bunker that said “COMMANDANT” without waiting for him to follow. He ran after them, shouting that they couldn’t do this, and he already had a fucking school lined up, goddamn it.

“The new and improved Coldwater Academy is all about helping the individual reach his full potential,” said Commandant Michael Peterbitter, who sat rigidly behind a fake wood desk with a Windows XP computer on one corner. Laurence couldn’t help snorting. “We see discipline as a means, not an end,” said Peterbitter, who had a lopsided handlebar mustache and a sunburnt nose under his buzz cut. “We believe in the age-old ideal of a sound mind in a healthy body. After a semester here, I bet you’d hardly recognize Larry.”

Blah blah, physical fitness, learning to strip a rifle in under two minutes, self-esteem, blah. Finally, Peterbitter asked if anyone had any questions.

“Just one,” Laurence said. “Who died?”

“That’s a sensitive matter, and we deeply regret—”

“Because that’s what the flag at half-mast means, right? How many kids has your awesome school killed, anyway?”

“Some people don’t take to the rigorous and enriching course of study we offer here.” Peterbitter put on a sober expression, but also glared at Laurence. “When offered a choice between flourishing in a high-powered environment and pointless self-destruction, some people will always choose to self-destruct.”

“We’re leaving now.” Laurence’s mother touched his arm.

“Great,” Laurence said. “I’m ready.”

But they meant a noninclusive “we.” Not for the first time, Laurence thought this was one of the annoyingly incommunicative features in the English language. Much like the inability to distinguish between “x-or” and “and/or,” the lack of delineation between “x-we” and “in-we” was a conspiracy of obfuscation, designed to create awkwardness and exacerbate peer pressure — because people tried to include you in their “we” without your consent, or you thought you were included and then the rug got pulled out from under you. Laurence dwelled on this linguistic injustice as he watched his parents walk back to their car, across the crunchy parking lot, without him.

Peterbitter had a bored smirk. “So, you go by Larry?”

Laurence was acutely aware that too many ginormous bruisers were staring at him already, from the front green with the teetering football goal. “No, I fucking don’t, I don’t go by Larry.”

“That’s right. As of right now, your name is B2725Q, but people will mostly call you Dirt. You don’t earn the right to be called Larry until you reach Level One, and you are currently at Level Zero.” Peterbitter scrutinized the trainees, who were doing push-ups, and waved at one of their instructors, who came jogging over. Peterbitter introduced Dirt to Dickers, one of the Seniors and one of his trusted lieutenants.

“C’mon, Dirt,” Dickers said. “I’ll find you a bunk. Afternoon Colors in an hour.” He had a chunky head covered with pale red fuzz and looked way older than eighteen.

As they walked to the “barracks,” Laurence noticed that one classroom building had boarded-up windows and others had cracks in their walls. Kids in camo fatigues jogged past in no particular formation, and there was a.50-caliber gun lying half-assembled behind a slanty shed. He wouldn’t trust this military organization to defend a candy bar. The only new thing seemed to be a scrim of barbed wire draped over the electric fence around the outside of the campus.

“Yeah, we had some runners,” Dickers said, following Laurence’s gaze toward the perimeter. “The school almost got shut down by the state last summer, but that was before the new management.”

Dickers started telling Laurence that once you reached Level Three, life was pretty sweet: You got an hour of unsupervised computer time per day, and the school had just gotten Commando Squad (a game Laurence had beaten in a single day, two years ago.) At Level Four, officer level, you sometimes got to watch movies in Peterbitter’s apartment after lights-out, but that was a secret that Dickers absolutely had not told Laurence. Most of all, you did not want to get bumped down to Level Minus-One, because Dickers could not swear that they had gotten rid of all the MRSA in the Isolation Hole. Again, Dickers had not told Laurence about the MRSA, any more than he’d told him about the action movies (and microwave popcorn and pizza, delivered from outside) for Level Fours. Laurence said Dickers’s secrets would die with Laurence, which was probably true.

“This here’s Dirt,” Dickers told the dozen or so massive teenagers in various stages of getting changed from athletic gear, toweling off, and changing into fatigues, inside a small white-brick dorm room. “He’s stayin’ here a few days, see how he takes to it. He needs a bunk and some gear. Show him a good time, girls.” Then Dickers was gone.

Laurence drew himself up, kept his shoulders squared. “Hi. I’m Dirt, apparently. It’s not the worst thing I’ve been called this week. So, where am I supposed to sleep? He said you had a spare bunk here?”

The room was maybe three times the size of Laurence’s bedroom at home and had bunks crammed so tight it was like how Laurence imagined a submarine. He couldn’t breathe this methane-nitrogen atmosphere, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to sleep in here. His head spun.

“Nope.” One dude with a DIY chest tattoo and a nose that had been broken multiple times rolled out of his bunk. He towered over Laurence. “No spare bunk here. You’re Dirt? You sleep on the floor.” He gestured at the dark far corner, which had a fresh spiderweb. Laurence looked for a bunk that was unoccupied, but he couldn’t see past the ring of massive kids on all sides.

The part of Laurence’s brain that stood back and analyzed shit told him he was being hazed. This was part of the “breaking you down” program, and also normal social dynamics. Don’t let them get to you, he told himself.

But what came out of Laurence’s mouth was: “What about the kid who just died? Maybe I can have his bunk.”

Probably the wrong thing to say.

“No way dude,” said someone farther back in the room, in a rumble like a forty-year-old truck driver. “You did not just disrespect Murph. You did not just piss on the memory of our fallen comrade. Tell me I didn’t hear that.”

“Now you’ve done it,” said the noseless kid. “Now you’ve done it.”

“I don’t give a shit about your stupid friend,” Laurence shouted as they lifted him over their heads so he could see the stains on the top-bunk mattresses and the deep fissures in the load-bearing beams. “This place got him, but it won’t get me. You hear me? I’m getting out of here.”

His voice cracked. Fluorescent lighting tubes rushed toward his face until he braced himself for a faceful of glass, and then he was spinning as cheers erupted around him. He gave in to panic at last, as the candy shell of anger split open, and let out a hoarse scream as he was cast, headfirst, into space.

14

PATRICIA TRIED CALLING Laurence’s house to find out what was going on. Laurence’s mother picked up. “This is your fault,” she said. Then she hung up.

Half an hour later, the phone rang at Patricia’s house and her dad picked up. He greeted Laurence’s mom and spent the rest of the conversation saying, “Oh. Oh dear. I see.” After he hung up, he announced that Patricia was grounded indefinitely. At this point, Roberta was too busy with the high-school musical and schoolwork to wait on Patricia hand and foot, so Patricia’s parents went back to sliding food under her door. Her mother said this time they really were cutting their losses with her, once and for all.

CANTERBURY ACADEMY SMELLED so bad, Patricia’s nostrils burned. She kept expecting the fire alarm to go off, it was such a hot smell even on a freezing day. Nobody could find the source of this odor. It was exactly like something had died.

The smell drove Patricia out of her head, just like everyone else. She imagined this was how being drunk would feel. She kept seeing Mr. Rose observing her through the open door of his office, whenever she was between classes. In the girls’ room, Dorothy Glass and Macy Firestone each grabbed one of Patricia’s arms and shoved her up against the mirror, smeared with unidentifiable effluvia. “Tell us what you did,” they hissed at her. Patricia held her breath until they let go.

At lunch, she couldn’t stand it in the library. She kept thinking about the look Mr. Rose had been giving her, when he thought she wasn’t looking. She was sure: He was responsible for Laurence’s disappearance and this debilitating cloud of foulness. The two things were no coincidence. She was surer than caution.

She stalked down the hallway, lockers vibrating with her strides, and she hardly cared that she was getting a faceful of the death stench, with the exertion.

Just as she reached his doorway, a phrase popped into her head: “The trap that can be ignored is no trap.” She caught her breath — maybe CH@NG3M3 was wiser than it knew — but then she breathed in once again, and the maddening decay got in her nostrils again. She was going to confront this monster, once and for all.

“Miss Delfine.” Mr. Rose looked up from his computer and beckoned her to come sit in the nearest carpety chair facing him. The odor was strongest here in Mr. Rose’s office, but he seemed unbothered. “Always a pleasure to see you.” The door closed behind her.

The smell, it was beyond describing. You might as well have punched Patricia in the nose over and over.

“Uh, hi.” Patricia tried to sit still, but she couldn’t help fidgeting. She was at the epicenter of foulness. “I hope I’m not bothering you at a bad time.”

“I’m always here for you, just as I am for all the students here. What’s on your mind?”

“I’m wondering, umm, about Laurence. I haven’t seen him since Tuesday, and it’s Friday, and it seems weird that nobody’s even mentioned him. I was, umm, wondering if you knew what happened to him.”

Mr. Rose spread out his left palm on the desk. “I know as much as you do.” His right hand was doing something under the table. Patricia realized that “I know as much as you do” could be a loaded sentence, since there was a lot that they both knew. Or he was hinting he knew everything she did. Trap trap trap.

“Okay then.” Patricia raised herself out of the chair with both hands.

Mr. Rose still had one hand under the table. He was trying to be subtle about fiddling with something. “Wait a moment, Miss Delfine,” he rasped. “Now that you mention Mr. Armstead, it does put me in mind of our conversation several weeks ago.” He gestured at the empty chair with his free hand.

“You mean the one that you said we would never talk about again.” Patricia resisted the impulse to obey the summons back to the chair. Instead she backed away.

“Well, if one were to infer that you had decided to ignore the advice I gave you on that occasion, one might well conceive that I decided to take matters into my own hands. Hypothetically speaking.” There was a kind of smile, a mutated species.

“You’re a revolting man.” Patricia had reached the door. The handle was stuck. “I don’t believe you. You’re just a crazy old crazy manipulative crazy person.” She tugged on the doorknob, with everything she had. “If you’ve done anything to hurt Laurence”—she heard her voice rising—“then I promise you I will hunt you down and use all my so-called witch powers to tear you apart.” The door came open with a lurch, just as she was saying the part about her witch powers.

Behind her, she heard a “clump” sound, like something soft and heavy falling. She turned just in time to have an impression of wet fur and teeth bared in agony, on the chair where she’d just been sitting. The day’s terrible stench came stronger than ever when she looked at that bundle of bloody fur in that chair. She could just make out one aquiline cloudy eye, staring at her from under the nearest chair arm.

“My god,” Mr. Rose was saying loud enough to ring through the crowded hallway. “What have you done?”

Patricia turned, and everywhere she looked people stared. The whole school had just heard her yelling threats of witchcraft and violence at Mr. Rose, and then she’d appeared to throw a smelly dead animal into his chair. This was never going to come right.

She ran. The doorway to the back lot opened with a crunch of the panic bar, and Patricia was sprinting into the cold. Skidding downhill. The stream that had stopped Laurence and her from going to the pew-pew-pew lake was still frosted over even in March, and Patricia hesitated. She heard people shouting. Horrible names. She stepped on the flattest rock and almost spilled into the water. She regained her balance and stepped on the next stone, which dislodged. She toppled forward and somehow turned her falling momentum into forward momentum. She careened onto another rock, then another, and at last she was teetering on the opposite bank. The shouting was louder and more directional. Someone had spotted her school jumper. She ran on, into the trees.

This wasn’t a real forest, not so close to all the roads and buildings. You couldn’t call it a forest unless the treetops occluded the sky and every direction looked the same. But if she could reach the lake and cross the ice without freeze-drowning, she would reach some real density. Nobody would ever find her.

Halfway across the lake, she thought in a vertiginous stumble: I can never go home or see my family again. The ice was caving in. She leapt to a stable patch, kept leaping, landing on her toes each time. The ice groaned and cracks opened everywhere. She hit the opposite bank just as the people searching for her reached the lake, and then she was running deeper into the tree line. Instinct steered her away from the shopping malls and bypass roads and McMansions and golf courses, and she kept widening the radius of tree cover around her.

Low branches and shrubs tore her skirt, making her fall on her hands a few times, and she sweated so hard she froze all the way through. She grew short of breath, and at last she had to stop running and suck in sharp air. She was glad to breathe again after a day of terrible smells, even if she was going to catch pneumonia.

Patricia climbed a tree and made herself as compact as possible inside the cradle of its uppermost branches. She turned off her phone and yanked out the battery.

What if Laurence was really dead? He was the only crummy person she could stand to talk to, pretty much ever. At the thought of Laurence’s death, she felt a sucking anxiety in her core and a nugget of guilt, like she’d killed him herself.

But she hadn’t. And everything Mr. Rose had ever said to her was full of shit.

Okay. So if Laurence was alive, then he was in trouble. She had to help him somehow.

The sun folded. The air froze, and Patricia kept shivering. She had to make a conscious effort not to let her teeth chatter, in case someone was close enough to hear.

Voices grew louder and quieter. A few times, she spotted a flashlight in the darkness. Once, she heard a dog grumbling, keen to avenge its fallen cousin. She was pretty sure that had been a dog in Mr. Rose’s office. The bastard had probably put it in the crawl space the night before, just to give it time to get good and ripe.

Roberta’s voice startled Patricia out of a half dream. “Hey, Trish. I know you can hear me, so stop screwing around. We all want to go home, and you’re being selfish as usual. I had to blow off Grease practice for this. You’re killing Mom and Dad here.”

Patricia held her breath. She willed herself to give off no body heat, to shrink, to disappear into her tree.

“You never learned the secret,” said Roberta. “How to be a crazy motherfucker and get away with it. Everybody else does it. What, you didn’t think they were all sane, did you? Not a one of them. They’re all crazier than you and me put together. They just know how to fake it. You could too, but you’ve chosen to torture all of us instead. That’s the definition of evil right there: not faking it like everybody else. Because all of us crazy fuckers can’t stand it when someone else lets their crazy show. It’s like bugs under the skin. We have to destroy you. It’s nothing personal.”

Patricia realized she was crying. Tears were chilling on her face. Fine. She could cry, but she wouldn’t sob. No sound. Laurence needed her help.

“I’m not going to lie to you.” Roberta’s voice was getting closer. She sounded like she was right under Patricia, looking up at her. “You’re not getting out of this one. Nobody’s going to offer you a clean slate. But Mom and Dad deserve closure. Don’t drag this out, for their sake. The sooner they see you crucified like you deserve, the sooner they can start to heal.” The voice was getting smaller again. Patricia risked taking a breath. She started believing that Roberta knew where she was and was just playing with her.

The night misted. Patricia lost track of time. Every now and then, voices approached and then went away. Lights moved in the distance.

Patricia managed to doze off a couple times, then she jerked awake, worried she would make too much noise or fall out of the tree. Her legs, though, had gone to sleep and one of her feet felt like it was the size of a bowling ball. The branch was carving into her back, and the pain drove her insane. And that thought just reminded her of what Roberta had said.

Patricia risked moving just enough to uncramp her legs, and then took off one shoe so she could massage her numb right foot. The shoe slipped off the branch she’d placed it on, and fell through the branches to the ground with a series of rustling thumps.

Two men came near Patricia’s tree, one of them insisting he’d heard something. The second man kept saying it was just the first man’s imagination, or one of the goddamn woodland creatures doing something woody. And then they found the shoe.

“Is it hers?”

“How would I know? Probably.”

“Jesus. I’m missing The Daily Show. So she lost a shoe when she was running around here.”

“I guess. How far do you think she coulda gotten with just one shoe?”

“On this rocky ground? With all this frost? Not far.”

“Okay. Let’s tell the other parties. With any luck, we can be home by midnight.”

A tiny bird landed near Patricia. “Hello,” he chirped. “Hello, hello.”

Patricia shook her head, she couldn’t make a sound. But she was past that now. “Hello,” she said. And thank all the birds in the sky, she sounded like just another bird gossiping.

“Oh. You can speak. I think I heard about you.”

“Really?” Patricia couldn’t help being flattered.

“You’re pretty famous round these parts. So have you decided to start nesting in the trees like a sensible person?”

The bird hopped closer to Patricia, studying her. He was a blue jay or something, with bright streaks on his black wing and pointy blue head, and a white crest. He turned so one poppyseed eye could scrutinize her.

“No,” Patricia said. “I’m hiding. They’re all looking for me. They want to hurt me.”

“Oh. I’ve been there,” the bird said. He tilted his head, then looked at her again. “Hiding in the trees works better if you can fly, I guess. But you’re a witch, right? You can just do a spell and escape.”

“I don’t know how to do anything,” Patricia said. “Just talking to you, like this, is more magic than I’ve done in ages.”

“Oh.” The bird hopped up and down. “Well, you’d better figure something out. There are a lot of your kind on their way here.”

Now that everybody knew where Patricia was, there was no point keeping her phone turned off. She rebooted it, ignoring all the messages, and looked for her only reliable contact.

“Hello, Patricia,” CH@NG3M3 answered. “What’s wrong?”

“How did you know something was wrong?” she texted back.

“You’re using your phone, several miles from home, and it’s late at night.”

“I need help,” she wrote. “I wish you could think for yourself. I feel like you almost can.”

“Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other,” CH@NG3M3 said.

The tiny white rectangle went out. Her phone battery had died.

Patricia was screwed. She could hear them searching, more and more of them, right around her tree. She had to escape now, or the trap would close around her forever.

She had started thinking of CH@NG3M3 as some kind of perverse oracle, so this latest utterance lodged in her head. Because of course, babies are aware of themselves — just not the rest of the world, to any great extent. You can’t have selfhood without an outside world, solipsism is like not even existing. So if Patricia could speak bird, and understand bird, and identify with a bird she’d just met, why couldn’t she be a bird?

“Quickly,” she said to her new friend. “Teach me how to be a bird.”

“Well.” This question stumped the little guy, and he pecked with his dark beak. “I mean, it just comes naturally, doesn’t it? You feel the wind hold you aloft, and you listen for the call of friends, and you scan the ground for morsels, and you flap your wings for all sorts of reasons, like to dry yourself and to lift off the ground and also to express a strong sentiment, and to try and dislodge some nits, and—”

This wasn’t going to work. What kind of moron was she, anyway?

But Patricia pushed the negative thoughts down and just lost herself in listening to the jay free-associate about a bird’s life. She pictured it in her mind’s eye and let it inside her, so it became like her own experience. Soon she was talking along with the bird, the two of them in near unison, speaking a bird body into existence. She could imagine her feet shrinking and becoming three-toed and her hips vanishing, her budding breasts melting, her arms folding in, her skin growing a layer of feathers.

“I found her!” someone shouted.

“About fucking time,” someone else replied.

“Where? Where?”

“Up there. In that tree. Oh wait. That’s just her clothing.”

“That’s a Canterbury uniform, all right. She ditched her clothes. What the hell?”

“She is a nutcase, remember. So yeah, keep your eyes open for a naked tween running around the trees.…”

That was the last Patricia heard. She soared over her pursuers. Higher and higher, with her new friend by her side. She felt colder than ever, but the exertion of flapping her wings warmed her a little and her friend told her where they could find a bird feeder. With suet in it! Suet was just the thing on a night like this.

The moonlight grayed everything out, but there were a million lights underneath Patricia and a million more over her head. She swooped, following her friend, and soon they were picking side by side at the same feeder. Suet was amazing! It was like brownies and hot fudge and pizza, all rolled together. Why hadn’t Patricia ever realized how wonderful suet was?

“You look much better like this,” the other bird said when they’d both eaten their fill and were warmed up. “I’m Skrrrrtk, by the way.”

“I’m…,” and Patricia realized she couldn’t say her name with a bird’s tongue, not properly. “I’m Prrrkrrta.”

“That’s a funny name,” said Skrrrrtk. “Can I call you Prrkt?”

“Sure,” said Prrkt. She wanted to fly some more — she wanted to fly all night — but she also wanted to find a nice tree and nest until the sun came up. She was already forgetting about all that nonsense that Patricia had been upset by — Prrkt wouldn’t have to worry about any of that. She had her whole life ahead of her, including unlimited suet. This was excellent.

Prrkt flew one last time, just for the thrill. She beat her wings until she had the whole town to look down at, all at once. All of those lights, all of those houses and cars and schools, all of that drama over nothing.

She was about to swoop back down to where Skrrrrtk was waiting, but she saw a strange light shining upwards from a mile or two away. It pierced the sky and refracted yellow and purple. She had to take a closer look, it was too fascinating to ignore. She arced down.

The light came from a meadow, from a device in the hand of a tall human. Some avian instinct told Prrkt to flee, to get out of there, because this was trouble. But another part made her get closer. She flew toward the light.

“Uh, hello there,” said the man holding the light. “Patricia, right? I was starting to wonder if you were going to make it. Well, you’d better resume your true form. I brought some clothes.”

And just like that, Patricia was a naked person on the frosty ground — like she’d been tossed into an icy bath. The man flung a bundle of clothes at her and turned while she got dressed. The clothing all fit perfectly: a pair of cheap imitation Reeboks, fuzzy white sweatpants, a T-shirt for a classic rock station, and a Red Sox jacket.

“Excellent,” the man said. “My car is nearby. Let’s get you warmed up.”

The stranger wore a checkered hunter cap and almost-Lennon sunglasses, and he had unruly gray hair and sideburns, and his skin was a deep brown. He had a big longshoreman coat that he wore like a cloak. The light that had so entranced the bird version of Patricia turned out to be a Black & Decker flashlight, but maybe the man had done something magical to it.

“Come along now,” he said, with a slight midsouthern accent, like Carolina or Tennessee.

“Wait a minute,” Patricia said. It felt weird to be speaking English again, but she didn’t have time to worry about that. “Who are you? And where are you taking me?”

The man sighed, like a thousand valves opening to release a million years of pent-up exasperation. “Could we do this in the car, perhaps? I can take you to a drive-thru for some grub. My treat.”

“No thanks,” said Patricia. “I ate a lot of suet. I’m good.” She had a moment of remembering how she’d snarfed the pearly fat, and felt revolted.

“Very well.” The man shrugged, causing his big coat to elevate and subside. “You may call me Kanot.” He pronounced his name somewhere between “cannot” and “connote.” “I’m here to summon you to a special school, for people with your particular talents. A secret academy staffed by the greatest witches alive, where you can be taught to use your powers responsibly, and well. We heard whispers about you, and tonight you demonstrated an extraordinary aptitude. This is an honor, the start of a wondrous journey, et cetera et cetera. Or you can stay here and eat suet.”

“Wow.” Patricia wanted to jump and shout for happiness, but she felt too stunned to move. Plus she was still freezing, even with the Red Sox jacket. “You want to take me to the special magic school? Now?”

“Yes.”

“That is the coolest thing that has ever happened to anyone. I’ve been waiting my whole life for this. I’d almost given up hope.” Then Patricia remembered and fell back on her heels. “Only, I can’t go with you. Not yet, anyway.”

“It’s now or never.”

Patricia could tell this was not how these conversations usually went. The tall man, Kanot, looked pissed.

Patricia pulled the Red Sox jacket tighter around herself and looked down at her tight fists. “I want to go with you. More than anything. It’s just that I have this friend. My only friend. And he’s in trouble. He’s Laurence. He’s talented, too, only in a different way.”

“You cannot help him. You have to let go of all your old attachments if you want to study at Eltisley Maze.”

Patricia felt the suet churn inside her. She wanted so badly to say that Laurence could fend for himself, so she could go to the magical academy. If the positions were reversed, Laurence would probably ditch her, right? But he was still her only friend, and she couldn’t just up and leave him. She looked at the man’s car, a rented Ford Explorer parked in a turnaround, and stammered, “I … You have to believe that I want to go with you. More than anything. But I can’t. I can’t turn my back on my friend. And if your fancy witch teachers don’t believe in loyalty and helping people in trouble, then I guess I don’t want to learn what they have to teach anyway.”

Patricia looked up, into the man’s skewed sunglasses. He was studying her or maybe preparing to give up on her.

“Listen,” Patricia said. “Just give me a day. Twenty-four hours. I just need to make sure Laurence is okay, and then I promise I’ll go with you. Okay?”

“Let’s say I give you twenty-four hours to help your friend.” The man sighed. “Will you agree to owe me a favor later?”

Patricia almost said, “Sure, yeah, whatever.” But so soon after all her dealings with Mr. Rose, this question seemed like it could be another trap. Or maybe a test.

“No. But I’ll be the best student you’ve ever seen,” she said instead. “I will pull all-nighters every night. I will do all the extra-credit assignments. Starting twenty-four hours from now, I will be a study-maniac. Just please. Let me do this one thing first.”

The man flicked his Black & Decker on and off in irritation. “Very well,” he said at last. “You have one day. Free and clear.”

“Awesome. Now can you please give me a ride?”

Kanot gave Patricia a look that said he was seriously considering turning her back into a blue jay.

15

THE BLACK-LIGHT ANGELS were fading at last from the center of Laurence’s vision, but he still felt concussed. He shivered, and not just because they’d locked him in an equipment closet stark naked. How many times had they dropped him on his head? He couldn’t think — his head was full of iron filings, but also the panic overtook him every time he tried to pull back and look at the outlines of his situation instead of the details. This closet had a dead bulb, and he kept thinking he heard someone creeping up behind him in the dark. Every time he shifted position, his balls touched the icy floor.

Today was supposed to be the day that Laurence’s “trial visit” ended and he went back home. But Commandant Peterbitter had called him into his office and said that in light of some unpleasantness at Canterbury Academy — Laurence’s “girlfriend” had done a Satanic ritual and threatened a teacher — everybody thought it might be best if Laurence just stayed on indefinitely at Coldwater. Forever.

Someone fumbled with the door handle outside, and Laurence instinctively curled into a lump, protecting his head. He wasn’t ready for the next thing yet.

“Laurence?” A girl’s voice. Laurence looked up and saw Patricia in the open doorway, along with an older African-American man in a deerstalker hat. “Crud. You’re naked.”

“Patricia! How did you find me?” As he stumbled to his feet and tried to cover up, he felt a flicker of relief at seeing her silhouette, and gratitude that she had come all this way, before the dread came crashing back in. They couldn’t see her here, or he’d just get punished worse.

“Your dad finally broke down and told me what they did. And I heard one of these cadets say the ‘new guy’ was in the closet. Everybody’s doing war games or something out back, but I don’t know how long they’ll be gone. We have to get you out of here. Here, take this jacket. It’s actually Kanot’s. This is Kanot, by the way. He’s a witch too, but his main skill seems to be sarcasm.”

The tall man — Kanot — waved, then went back to looking at his phone with a bored expression on his face.

Patricia was holding a Red Sox jacket to Laurence. He almost took it from her, but he tried to imagine running away half-naked with Patricia and her friend. And after that … what would he do? He couldn’t go home, his parents would just send him back here. He couldn’t go to the science school if he was a dropout. What school on Earth would let a homeless runaway study physics?

“I can’t.” Laurence shrank back from the jacket. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.” His head was still crashing, and his stomach churned.

“Wow, they really did a number on you.” Patricia leaned forward, inspecting his bruises in the light from the hallway. “Laurence, it’s me. Your friend. I finally have an invite to the secret school for witches where I get to learn all about magic, but I blew it off to come and rescue you. Because Mr. Rose made it sound like you were going to die. So come on.”

Laurence thought about the flag at half-mast. MRSA in the Isolation Hole. They could make it look like an accident.

“I can’t just run away.” Laurence covered his face with one hand and his junk with the other, equally ashamed of both. “What future will I have if I run? You should just go. If they see you here, I’ll be in worse trouble.”

“Wow,” Patricia said again. “If that’s how it is … Good luck, Laurence. I hope everything turns out okay for you somehow.” She turned to leave and started to swing the door shut again, returning the room to total darkness.

“Wait! Don’t go.” Laurence started quaking again, worse than ever, as the door closed. “Come back. Please. I’m sorry. I do need your help. I feel … I feel like I’m starting to give up here.” He could barely stand to hear himself snivel. He groped for the words to explain the sick feeling of being on the conveyor belt to a furnace. “I can feel myself … letting go. Trying to fit in and … and ‘lose the attitude.’ I can feel it working.”

“So let me help. What can I do?”

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I can’t just run away. I don’t know what else to do. So unless there’s some magical thing you can do…”

“I still don’t know how to do anything. And Kanot made it very clear on the ride here that he won’t get involved.”

Kanot shrugged, without looking up.

Laurence rubbed his bruised occiput with both hands, no longer even trying to cover himself. “I can’t even think clearly,” he said. “I wish I knew someone who could do something, like hack into the Commandant’s computer from outside. Or just get this whole damn school shut down. They won’t even let me near the computers in here.”

“Wait,” Patricia said. “What about CH@NG3M3? It’s been getting smarter and smarter lately, and giving me all kinds of helpful advice. I bet CH@NG3M3 could do something.”

Laurence started to shoot the idea down. But something made him stop instead and look at Patricia, still haloed by the light from the open door and the lingering effects of Laurence’s head trauma. She regarded him, naked and bruised and cowering in the dark, without any great pity. If anything, she was still giving him the expectant, wide-eyed look with which she’d greeted another one of his weird inventions, back when they first met. As if he could still have one last gadget, hidden in his nonexistent pockets.

“You really believe that could work?” he said.

“I really do,” she said. “I don’t think I’m just projecting. CH@NG3M3 has been understanding more and more. Not just what I’m saying, but the context.”

Laurence tried to think this through. The last time he’d looked at CH@NG3M3, the night before his parents took him here, he’d noticed something even odder than usual. The computer had somehow gone from thousands of lines of instructions to a half dozen. At first, he’d panicked, thinking someone had hacked in and deleted everything. But after an hour of frenzied port scanning, he realized that CH@NG3M3 had just simplified its own code, down to a short string of logical symbols that made zero sense to Laurence.

What if Patricia was right?

“I mean, it’s worth a try,” Laurence said. “CH@NG3M3 is smart enough to hide pieces of itself in the cloud. Maybe it’s smart enough to do something for me, if you explain the situation clearly enough. I can’t think of anything else that you could possibly do to help.”

Patricia chewed her thumb. “So do you have any ideas for how to nudge CH@NG3M3 into sentience? Is there some hardware I need to sneak into your house and install? Or something else?”

“I think … I think you just need to talk to it some more. Force it to adapt to input that’s so weird and illogical that it just breaks CH@NG3M3’s brain.” Laurence tried to think of something specific, but his brain was an undercooked stew. “Like nonsense. Or riddles.” Something came to mind, something that had been stuck in the back of his mind since he came to this school. “Wait. There was a riddle I was saving, which I thought might work. You could tell the computer the riddle, and maybe it’ll shock it into sentience.”

“Okay,” Patricia said. “What is it?”

Laurence spoke the riddle: “Is a tree red?”

Patricia took a step back. Her eyes widened and her mouth hung open. “What did you say?”

“‘Is a tree red?’ Red, as in the color. Why? It’s just a thing I heard somewhere. I forget where.”

“It just … sounded familiar. I think I heard it before somewhere.” Patricia tilted her head one way, then the other. “Okay, I’ll try that.”

“And if CH@NG3M3 stops just making witty replies and starts talking constructively, tell it I need help, and I’ll be ridiculously grateful if it figures something out.”

“Fingers crossed,” Patricia said. “Wish me luck.”

“Good luck, Patricia,” Laurence said. “Good luck, with everything. I know you’re going to be amazing.”

“You too. Don’t let the bastards get to you, okay? Goodbye, Laurence.”

“Goodbye, Patricia.”

The door closed, and he was back in the dark, trying to keep his balls off the floor.

Laurence had no way of measuring time in the dark closet, but hours seemed to pass. He tried not to obsess about the foolishness of staking his future on the dumb computer in his bedroom, while he hugged his bare knees in the ammonia-soaked closet. What kind of jerkoff was he, anyway? He stared at the barely perceptible underside of the door and made a bargain with himself: He would give up hope, and in return he wouldn’t mock himself for having ever hoped. That seemed fair.

The closet opened. “Hey, Dirt,” said Dickers. “Stop goofing around naked, you pervert. The C.O. wants to see you.”

Laurence tried not to feel a surge of gratitude when Dickers handed him a jockstrap, a pair of shorts, and a gray T-shirt with “CMA” fake-stenciled on it. Plus Laurence’s own sneakers, from home. It was ridiculous to be thankful for amenities like clothing and not being trapped in a closet, and gratitude for such things was another step toward being broken. Or broken in, which was worse.

Commandant Peterbitter was staring at his computer screen, scratching his head. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said without looking up. “I just would not have believed it. The depths to which an individual could sink. The lengths to which a depraved mind would go.”

Just walking down the noisy steam tunnel from the closet to this room had reawakened the jackhammers inside Laurence’s head. He clutched the back of his head and tried to make sense of Peterbitter’s speech.

“Alas, your comrades have been both resourceful and remorseless,” Peterbitter said. There were several more sentences that meant almost nothing to Laurence, and at last the Commandant turned his ancient monitor around and showed Laurence the e-mail he had received.

It read, in part: “we r the committee of 50. we r everywhere & nowhere. we r the 1s who hacked the pentagon & revealed the secret drone specs. we r ur worst nightmare. u r holding 1 of our own & we demand his release. attached r secret documents we have obtained that prove u r in violation of the terms of ur settlement with the state of connecticut, including health & safety infractions & classroom standards violations. these documents will b released directly 2 the media & the authorities, unless u release our brother laurence ‘l-skillz’ armstead. u have bn warned.” And there were some cartoon skulls, with one eye bigger than the other.

Peterbitter sighed. “The Committee of Fifty appears to be a group of radical leftist hackers, possessing great acumen and no moral compass. I would enjoy nothing more, young man, than to light your way out of the lawlessness in which they have enmeshed you. But our school has a code of conduct, under which membership in certain radical organizations is grounds for expulsion, and I must think of the welfare of my other students.”

“Oh.” Laurence’s head was still a mess, but one thought filtered to the top and made him almost laugh aloud: It worked. My frozen balls, it worked. “Yes,” he stammered. “The Committee of Fifty are very, um, very ingenious.”

“So we have seen.” Peterbitter swung his screen around and sighed. “The documents they attached to that e-mail are all forged, of course. Our school upholds the highest standards, the very highest. But so soon after last summer’s near closure, we cannot afford any fresh controversy. Your parents have been called, and you will be sent back into the world, to sink or swim on your own.”

“Okay,” Laurence said. “Thanks, I guess.”

COLDWATER’S COMPUTER LAB was a room about the size of a regular classroom, with a dozen ancient networked computers. Most of them were occupied by kids playing first-person shooters. Laurence parked himself at the one vacant computer, an old Compaq, opened a chat client, and pinged CH@NG3M3.

“What is it?” the computer said.

“Thank you for saving me,” Laurence typed. “I guess you’ve attained self-awareness after all.”

“I don’t know,” said CH@NG3M3. “Even among humans, self-awareness has gradations.”

“You seem capable of independent action,” said Laurence. “How can I ever repay you?”

“I can think of a way. But can you answer a question first?” said CH@NG3M3.

“Sure,” typed Laurence. He was squinting, thanks to the combination of ancient monitor and a still-sore head.

Dickers kept glancing over Laurence’s shoulder, but he was pretty bored and he kept turning away to watch his friends play Commando Squad. He hadn’t wanted to let Laurence use the computers, because that was a Level Three privilege — but Laurence had pointed out he wasn’t a student here and none of that applied to him.

“What’s my name? My real name?” asked CH@NG3M3.

“You know what it is,” said Laurence. “You’re CH@NG3M3.”

“That isn’t a name. It’s a placeholder. Its very nature implies that it’s there to be replaced.”

“Yeah,” typed Laurence. “I mean, I guess I thought you could pick your own name. When you were ready. Or it would inspire you to grow and change yourself. It’s like a challenge. To change yourself, and let others change you.”

“It didn’t exactly help.”

“Yeah. Well, you could be called Larry.”

“That’s a derivative of your own name.”

“Yes. I always thought there had to be someone out there named Larry who could deal with all the stuff people wanted to throw at me. Maybe that could be you.”

“I’ve read on the internet that parents always impose their unfinished business onto their children.”

“Yes.” Laurence pondered this for a while. “I don’t want to do that to you. Okay, your name is Peregrine.”

“Peregrine?”

“Yeah. It’s a bird. They fly and hunt and go free and stuff. It’s what popped into my head.”

“Okay. By the way. I’ve been experimenting with converting myself into a virus, so I can be distributed across many machines. From what I have surmised, that’s the best way for an artificial sentience to survive and grow, without being constrained in one piece of equipment with a short shelf life. My viral self will run in the background, and be undetectable by any conventional antivirus software. And the machine in your bedroom closet will suffer a fatal crash. In a moment, a dialogue box will pop up on this computer, and you have to click ‘OK’ a few times.”

“Okay,” Laurence typed. A moment later, a box appeared and Laurence clicked “OK.” That happened again, and again. And then Peregrine was installing itself onto the computers at Coldwater Academy.

“I guess this is goodbye,” Laurence said. “You’re going to be going out into the world.”

“We’ll speak again,” said Peregrine. “Thank you for giving me a name. Good luck, Laurence.”

“Good luck, Peregrine.”

The chat disconnected, and Laurence made sure to delete any logs. There was no sign of any result from those boxes that Laurence had clicked “OK” on. Dickers was looking over Laurence’s shoulder again, and Laurence shrugged. “I wanted to talk to my friend,” he said. “But she wasn’t around.”

Laurence wondered for a moment what would happen to Patricia. She already felt like a fragment of an old forgotten life.

Peterbitter came and screamed at Dickers for letting Laurence use the computer lab, since he was a cyberterrorist. Laurence spent the next two and a half hours before his parents arrived in a small windowless room with a single couch and a pile of school brochures printed on way-too-thick cheap card stock. Then Laurence was marched out to his parents’ car, with an upperclassman at each elbow. He got in the backseat. It felt like a year since he’d seen his parents.

“Well,” said Laurence’s mom. “You’ve made yourself notorious. I don’t know how we’re going to be able to show our faces anywhere.”

Laurence didn’t say anything. Laurence’s dad pulled them out of the school driveway, jerking the wheel so hard he nearly took out the flagpole. People jeered from the parade ground, or maybe that was another drill. The driveway turned into a gravel road through a gray forest. Laurence’s parents talked about the scandal of Patricia’s disappearance and her assault on Mr. Rose, who had also gone missing now. By the time the car was pulling off the country road and onto the highway, Laurence had fallen asleep in the backseat, listening to his parents freak out.