Chapter 2

The first thing Jack noticed about high school was how loud it was.

Not sound volume exactly — middle school had been loud enough. This was a different kind of loud. The status-seeking was louder. The performing was louder. Everyone was running some version of a first impression in those early days, and the effort was visible from across the cafeteria.

He found it useful to arrive early. Not to establish territory — he wasn’t interested in that — but because a room told you more when it was half-empty than when it was full. He’d absorbed this from his father without being taught it directly. Nathan Turner always arrived early to things.

Orientation was on a Wednesday. Jack put on dark jeans and a clean button-down, ate breakfast, and rode with his mother to the school. She dropped him at the front entrance, told him to have a good day in a tone that meant it without requiring a response. He thanked her and went in.

The gym was where they’d gathered the incoming freshman class — maybe three hundred kids arranged in rows of folding chairs. Jack found a seat near the middle. Not the back, which was where kids sat when they wanted to signal they didn’t care. Not the front, which was for the over-eager. He sat and watched people come in.

The social sorting had already started.

There were kids who arrived in groups and moved as a unit, territory staked before they sat down. There were kids who came alone and immediately started scanning for someone they recognized, relief visible the moment they found them. And there were a handful who came in alone and sat down without scanning — comfortable in the solitude. Jack noted this last group. In his experience, those were either the shyest or the most settled, and you couldn’t tell which from a single data point.

The jocks announced themselves within the first twenty minutes. Not because they were loud — some were, some weren’t — but because they moved through the room like they’d pre-decided they belonged to it. Jack recognized the type from middle school, scaled up. The posturing was more deliberate here. These were freshmen who’d been big fish in their previous school and had arrived at San Mateo High intending to maintain that position by force of will, which was a plan that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t, and which Jack had no particular interest in challenging or enabling.

He watched three of them work the row of girls that had settled along the left side of the gym. A girl who was obviously a cheerleader — the confidence was recognizable before he even saw the practice bag at her feet — collected the most traffic. Two different guys drifted over within ten minutes of each other and started conversations. She handled both of them with the ease of someone who’d been managing exactly this for at least two years.