Chapter 3: Ordinary Classes, Impossible Life

The school smelled the same as it always did—floor wax and old paper and the particular staleness of a building that recycled its air too many times a day—and Eli walked through the front doors into that smell like he was walking into a memory of a life he used to have. Kids moved past him in the hall, loud, half-asleep, talking about nothing in the easy way people talk when nothing’s actually wrong with their morning. Somebody’s laugh rang out too sharp near the trophy case. A locker slammed. Eli stood off to the side for a second, getting his bearings, feeling like a man walking into a movie theater partway through the film, trying to catch up on a plot everybody else already understood.

He’d changed his shirt in the bus station bathroom before he left, splashed water on his face, done what he could. It wasn’t much. He could feel how he must look—the kind of tired that sits behind the eyes and doesn’t wash off, the kind that made old ladies at the grocery store ask if you were coming down with something. He kept his head down walking to his locker, hoping that would be enough.

It wasn’t quite enough for Samir Ortiz, who fell into step beside him without any kind of introduction, the way he always did, like gravity.

“You look like hell,” Samir said, cheerful about it the way he was cheerful about most things, including bad grades and bad weather and the cafeteria’s Tuesday chili, which had a reputation. “No offense. Late night?”

“Something like that,” Eli said, working the combination on his locker, missing it twice before it caught.

“Big birthday plans? You turned eighteen yesterday, right? I saw it on your mom’s page. Cake and everything.”

“Yeah,” Eli said. He didn’t say anything else, and something in the flatness of it must have caught, because Samir didn’t push. He just leaned against the locker next to Eli’s, arms crossed, watching him with the kind of patient, unbothered attention he brought to most things—a guy who noticed plenty and mostly kept it to himself until it mattered.

“You eat breakfast?” Samir asked, like it was a normal question. Which it was, most days.

“Not really.”

“There’s a granola bar in my bag that’s probably stale but not, like, dangerous,” Samir said. “You want it?”

Eli almost laughed—the offer was so small and so exactly what he needed and had no way of asking for. “Yeah,” he said. “Actually, yeah, I do.”

He ate it walking to first period, and it helped more than a granola bar had any right to help. Chewing it, he thought about how strange a day could get—twenty-four hours ago he’d had a stack of pancakes with a candle in it and a family singing happy birthday, and now he was grateful down to his teeth for somebody’s forgotten granola bar. He didn’t let himself go much further down that road. There wasn’t time. The bell rang and he had to go sit in a classroom and act like a person whose life hadn’t just come apart.

Government class went the way it always went—Mr. Halloran up at the front talking about the electoral college in the same flat voice he used for everything, like the material bored even him—and Eli sat near the back and tried to look like he was taking notes. He wrote his name at the top of the page. After that his pen didn’t do much. His eyes kept sliding to the window, to the parking lot, to the ordinary gray sky sitting over the ordinary gray asphalt, like if he stared long enough it might explain something.

He caught himself doing the math again, the same math from the bus station bench—sixty-two dollars, plus the forty from the envelope, minus whatever he’d need for food, minus a night at the motel if it came to that, minus, minus, minus—until Halloran called on him for an answer he didn’t have. The whole class turned to look. Eli said something dumb about checks and balances that got half credit and a few snickers, then sat back down feeling his face go hot.